Background: Cytokines play an important and variable role in respiratory diseases, including Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) and asthma. Some cytokines can induce airway inflammation, allergy and asthma and thereby contribute to the pathogenesis of respiratory disease by different mechanisms. Anti-cytokine autoantibodies have been detected in several infectious, inflammatory and autoimmune disorders, and may have a protective role in the pathogenesis of these diseases. However, the presence and function of serum anticytokine autoantibodies in COPD and asthma is unknown. Furthermore, the use of neutralising antibody against cytokines is a powerful approach in drug development to block cytokine-mediated pathogenic effects in disease.
Hypothesis: My hypothesis is that anti-cytokine autoantibodies are produced naturally in respiratory disorders (Asthma and COPD) and that these may be differentially associated with the severity and pathogenesis of these diseases, depending on the nature of the cytokine and the associated autoantibody.

Aims: To address this hypothesis I set out the following aims: 1) To investigate whether COPD and asthma patients develop anti-cytokines autoantibodies, 2) To study their association with the severity, clinical phenotypes and biomarkers of COPD and asthma (Chapter 3 and 4), 3) To study the immunological features and functions of anti-IL-33 autoantibodies in asthma (Chapter 4), and 5) To investigate how anti-IL-33 autoantibodies are developed in asthma patients (Chapter 5).

Methods: To test this hypothesis and to detect anti-cytokine autoantibodies in asthma and COPD serum, I firstly established the Luciferase Immunoprecipitation System (LIPS) assay for the detection of autoantibody against 14 cytokines in clinical serum samples (Chapter 3). I addressed the aims using different experimental protocols including neutralisation assays to investigate the function of anti-IL-33 autoantibody in asthma samples (Chapter 4). Several methods, including in vitro immunisation, flow cytometry and antibody gene cloning were used to understand the development and function of the anti-IL-33 autoantibodies in asthma (Chapter 5).

Results: a) I successfully established and optimised the luciferase immunoprecipitation assay system (LIPS) for the expression of 14 luciferase-fused Th1, Th2, Th17 and Treg cytokines in Cos-1 cells. Using LIPS, several anti-cytokine autoantibodies against IL-1α, IL-8, IFNγ, IL-10, IL-37, TGFβ were detected at significantly high titres for the first time in COPD serum samples. The anti-cytokine titres do not correlate with the concentration of the corresponding cytokines in serum and in lung fluid from COPD patients, and they do not correlate with disease severity nor are they predominant in any of the COPD phenotypes studied (Chapter 3). The function of these serum anti-cytokine autoantibodies in COPD remains unresolved.
b) For the first time, serum anti-IL-33 and anti-IL-5 autoantibodies were detected in significantly raised titres in asthma patients, mainly in those with mild asthma. These anti-IL-33 autoantibodies had neutralising activity and could block IL-33 mediated effects in vitro. Furthermore, the anti-IL33 autoantibodies are predominantly of the IgG isotype and their titre correlated negatively with the serum concentration of IL-33, IL-4, IL-5 and IL-25 which are key cytokines involved with the pathogenesis of asthma. The anti-IL-33 titre also correlated negatively with the serum total IgE concentration in asthma patients (Chapter 4).
c) Several key experimental strategies and methods were established to understand the development and function of the anti-IL-33 autoantibodies in asthma including (i) in vitro immunisation to understand how the anti-IL33 autoantibodies were generated, (ii) flow cytometry strategies to identify the IL-33-specific B cell subset in asthma, and (iii) strategies were established for the IgG V-region cloning of the anti-IL-33 autoantibody from asthma patients (Chapter 5).

Conclusion and prospects: the data presented demonstrated that the LIPS assay is a sensitive, specific and high-throughput method for screening autoantibodies, including anti-cytokine autoantibody in asthma and COPD.
My results also demonstrated that patients with asthma and COPD have developed natural anti-cytokine autoantibodies and the antibody profiles are different between the two disorders, further confirming their difference in pathology and immune mechanism. The anti-IL-33 autoantibodies in asthma patients have neutralising activity and may be associated with disease severity. However, the functions of anti-cytokine autoantibodies in COPD are still largely unknown. The prospects from this work include to reveal their development and function in clinical asthma and COPD, identify the cytokine specific B and T cells and also cloning and bulk synthesis of natural human anti-IL-33 with therapeutic potential.


The actomyosin cytoskeleton is a crucial driver of morphogenesis. Yet how the behavior of large-scale cytoskeletal patterns in deforming tissues emerges from the interplay of geometry, genetics, and mechanics remains incompletely understood. Convergent extension flow in D. melanogaster embryos provides the opportunity to establish a quantitative understanding of the dynamics of anisotropic non-muscle myosin II. Cell-scale analysis of protein localization in fixed embryos suggests that there are complex rules governing how the control of myosin anisotropy is regulated by gene expression patterns. However, technical limitations have impeded quantitative and dynamic studies of this process at the whole embryo level, leaving the role of geometry open. Here we combine in toto live imaging with quantitative analysis of molecular dynamics to characterize the distribution of myosin anisotropy and corresponding genetic patterning. We found pair rule gene expression continuously deformed, flowing with the tissue frame. In contrast, myosin anisotropy orientation remained nearly static, aligned with the stationary dorsal-ventral axis of the embryo. We propose myosin recruitment by a geometrically defined static source, potentially related to the embryo-scale epithelial tension, and account for transient deflections by the interplay of cytoskeletal turnover with junction reorientation by flow. With only one parameter, this model quantitatively accounts for the time course of myosin anisotropy orientation in wild-type, twist, and even-skipped embryos as well as embryos with perturbed egg geometry. Geometric patterning of the cytoskeleton suggests a simple physical strategy to ensure a robust flow and formation of shape.


Abstract Self-report purchase tasks are a novel approach examining the reinforcing value of addictive behaviour relative to increasing monetary costs required to access the addictive behaviour (i.e. demand). These measures reveal a positive relationship between the indices of demand and addiction problem severity and can elucidate factors associated with motivation for substance use. Gambling is an addictive behaviour that has not been examined using this paradigm. This study seeks to adapt and examine the purchase task for gambling behaviour. A gambling purchase task was devised that asked individuals how often per month they would gamble at various cover charges. Participants were 73 adults from the community with either gambling disorder (n = 28) or alcohol use disorder (n = 24) or were a healthy control (n = 21). Both the alcohol and gambling purchase tasks were administered. Results demonstrate discriminant validity of the gambling purchase task, as individuals with gambling disorder have significantly greater demand for accessing gambling than other groups. The alcohol purchase task also evidenced discriminant validity in that individuals with alcohol use disorder have significantly greater demand for alcohol than other groups. These findings support the use of the gambling purchase task to assess the demand for gambling.


Chemosensitive single-channel fluctuations were observed to be induced in essentially solvent-free lipid bimolecular membranes by the addition of sonicated homogenates of rat olfactory epithelium. The chemosensitive channels were not observed when respiratory epithelium homogenates were used instead. Ionic selectivity is consistent with potassium ions as the charge carrier. These channels may be associated with the initial events of chemoreception in the rat olfactory epithelium.


Osteoarthritis (OA) is a common cause of lameness, pain, and dysfunction in dogs. To determine the levels of interleukin (IL) (IL-1β, IL-6, IL-10), tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-α, and prostaglandin E2 (PG-E2) in the synovial fluid after intra-articular injection of an autologous platelet-rich plasma concentrate to treat dogs with osteoarthritis. Twenty dogs with osteoarthritis (OA) were used as a materials. Fourteen dogs were used as a platelet-rich plasma (PRP) treatment group and 6 dogs were used as a control (0.9 % NaCl). PRP was obtained by the double centrifuge method. Affected joints were examined by radiography and ultrasonography. Lameness and pain severity were evaluated by attending clinicians. Samples were collected under sterile conditions at pre-treatment, days 1, 3, 5, 7, 15, and weeks 4, 8, and 12. The marker levels were determined by an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. No adverse effects of the injection of platelet concentrate or saline solution were observed. No significant differences were found in the Hudson Visual Analog Scale and Canine Brief Pain Inventory scores between weeks 0, 4, and 12 in the control dogs. No significant changes were observed in IL-1β, IL-6, IL-10, TNF-α, and PG-E2 levels (P>0.05) in synovial fluid from the PRP treatment group compared to synovial fluid from the control group, although fluctuations in parameter levels were observed in both groups. Despite some variable results in inflammatory parameters, clinical improvement was recorded in the PRP-treated group. PRP injection could be an effective and safe method for treatment of dogs with osteoarthritis.


This study aimed to measure the subsequent health and health service cost burden of a cohort of workers hospitalised after sustaining work-related traumatic spinal injuries (TSI) across New South Wales, Australia. A record-linkage study (June 2013–June 2016) of hospitalised cases of work-related spinal injury (ICD10-AM code U73.0 or workers compensation) was conducted. Of the 824 individuals injured during this time, 740 had sufficient follow-up data to analyse readmissions ≤90 days post-acute hospital discharge. Individuals with TSI were predominantly male (86.2%), mean age 46.6 years. Around 8% (n = 61) experienced 119 unplanned readmission episodes within 28 days from discharge, over half with the primary diagnosis being for care involving rehabilitation. Other readmissions involved device complications/infections (7.5%), genitourinary or respiratory infections (10%) or mental health needs (4.3%). The mean ± SD readmission cost was $6946 ± $14,532 per patient. Unplanned readmissions shortly post-discharge for TSI indicate unresolved issues within acute-care, or poor support services organisation in discharge planning. This study offers evidence of unmet needs after acute TSI and can assist trauma care-coordinators' comprehensive assessments of these patients prior to discharge. Improved quantification of the ongoing personal and health service after work-related injury is a vital part of the information needed to improve recovery after major work-related trauma.


The anti-phospholipid syndrome (APS) is a systemic autoimmune disease characterized by an adaptive immune response against self phospholipid (PL)--binding proteins. Although APS is considered as an autoantibody-mediated disease, there is now evidence that anti-phospholipid antibodies (aPL) are necessary but not sufficient to trigger some of the clinical manifestations of the syndrome. For example, mediators of the innate immunity are recognized to be additional second hits able to induce the thrombotic events in the presence of aPL. Finally, environmental agents – in particular infectious ones – were reported to act as triggers for the production of autoantibodies cross-reacting with PL-binding proteins as well as inflammatory stimuli that potentiate the aPL thrombogenic effect. Altogether, these findings suggest a role for the innate immunity in APS pathogenesis. Toll-like receptors (TLR) are receptors that induce prompt inflammatory responses and mediate functional activation in immune effector cells. There is evidence that aPL, and in particular anti-β2 glycoprotein I (β2GPI) antibodies, may activate endothelial cells and monocytes through TLR-4-dependent signalling. Whether or not TLR may behave as surface receptors for β2GPI is still matter of research. Drugs or molecules able to interfere with TLR involvement may represent new therapeutic approaches for APS.


This paper presents findings from a recent research project that provided an opportunity for the voices of a special group of young people to be heard. The biological children of foster families have rarely been the focus of foster care research. Their stories are used in this study to highlight individual experiences and, ultimately, to inform the practice of offering support to foster families. Twenty-two young people between the ages of nine and thirty-two were interviewed. Their stories told of life in a confusing and contradictory world of foster care. This paper presents, through the words of the young people, four essential themes that highlight these contradictions. These are: sharing and losing; being responsible and escaping; caring and resenting; shouting and keeping quiet. Recommendations are made to improve training and support to foster families.


This thesis studies some of the problems arising in the analysis of random signals. The digital computer simulations of the first and second order Gaussian processes are employed for the problems requiring empirical investigations. Moreover some exact autocorrelation functions are also used for further demonstrations. The required filter characteristics, for generation of the first and second order processes with prescribed autocorrelation functions, are designed and the equations for the digital computer simulations are derived. The Gaussian data are then generated for a variety of simulation studies being undertaken. The statistical errors in the digital estimates of the probability density functions are considered. The sampling properties of the autocorrelation estimates from uniformly sampled data are also studied; the theoretical and empirical estimate errors are compared and a simplification of the complicated expression, giving the expected error magnitudes, is examined. The maximum determinant method of autocorrelation function extrapolation is studied empirically. The reliability test and the extrapolation errors are examined and the best choice of the truncation point is deduced. The equivalence of the maximum determinant and maximum entropy approaches is shown analytically. Some simulation examples of the maximum entropy spectra and their transformations to the autocorrelation domain are also reported. A problem arising in certain situations is that the zero lag coefficient may be known and followed by a number of unknown coefficients and then a knowledge of the remaining portion of the autocorrelation function. A method of estimating the missing initial coefficients has been introduced in Stone (1978), where further research has also been suggested on it, regarding the selection of the estimates. This and further studies of the method are reported in this thesis. The problem of aliasing is analysed and demonstrated. The effects of data interpolation on the spectral estimates are then investigated. In particular, the application of linear and cubic spline interpolation methods, to the autocorrelation function and the sampled data, are considered. Finally, the thesis studies the sequential sampling scheme. Its contribution in minimizing the problem of aliasing, when the sampling interval is restricted to a minimum allowable value, is proved and demonstrated. The methods of estimating the autocorrelation function and spectra, in sequential sampling, are discussed and presented.


We propose a distance supervised relation extraction approach for long-tailed, imbalanced data which is prevalent in real-world settings. Here, the challenge is to learn accurate "few-shot" models for classes existing at the tail of the class distribution, for which little data is available. Inspired by the rich semantic correlations between classes at the long tail and those at the head, we take advantage of the knowledge from data-rich classes at the head of the distribution to boost the performance of the data-poor classes at the tail. First, we propose to leverage implicit relational knowledge among class labels from knowledge graph embeddings and learn explicit relational knowledge using graph convolution networks. Second, we integrate that relational knowledge into relation extraction model by coarse-to-fine knowledge-aware attention mechanism. We demonstrate our results for a large-scale benchmark dataset which show that our approach significantly outperforms other baselines, especially for long-tail relations.


We have evaluated the information theoretical performance of variable rate adaptive channel coding for Rayleigh fading channels. The channel states are detected at the receiver and fed back to the transmitter by means of a noiseless feedback link. Based on the channel state informations, the transmitter can adjust the channel coding scheme accordingly. Coherent channel and arbitrary channel symbols with a fixed average transmitted power contraint are assumed. Thechannel capacityand the error exponent are evaluated and the optimal rate control rules are found for Rayleigh fading channels with feedback of channel states. It is shown that the variable rate scheme can only increase the channel error exponent. The effects of additional practical constraints and finite feedback delays are also considered. Finally, we compare the performance of the variable rate adaptive channel coding in high bandwidth-expansion systems (CDMA) and high bandwidth-efficiency systems (TDMA).


: This article reflects on the power and dangers of diagrams as a mode of anthropological exposition, comparing this particular form of non-text to the brief dalliance of mid-century anthropology with algebraic and logical formulae. It has been claimed that diagrams, like formulae, are clearer, simpler, or less deceptive than textual argument. By contrast, this article argues that diagrams are just as slippery and tricky as words, but that images and words slip and slide in different ways. Holding both diagrams and words together when building an argument enables not only a specific kind of rigor, but also moments of unexpected theoretical invention. This technique of holding together contrasting heuristics scales up as a productive epistemic device for anthropology more broadly.


Abstract The vortex tube is a small, likable, and marvelous mechanical device used as refrigeration machine. Vortex tube is a device having no moving parts that separates the high pressure stream flow into two streams namely hot and cold at defined pressure. At the separation of two streams, one stream rejects the heat and becomes colder while the other receives the rejected heat and becomes hotter as compared to previous one. As there are no moving parts, maintenance required is also less which had made vortex tube reasonably priced. It has wide applications in industrial area for cooling purpose of tools, in electrical industries, CCTV, etc. Performance valuation of vortex tube is carried out by varying important parameters like cross section area of hot and cold end, nozzle area of inlet compressed air, cold orifice area, and hot end area of the tube L/D ratio and COP. Keywords: Energy separation, vortex flow, Ranque-Hilsch vortex tube, cooling effect, COP Cite this Article Joshi DK. Vortex Tube Refrigeration System under Different Working Parameters: A Study. Journal of Refrigeration, Air Conditioning, Heating and Ventilation . 2017; 4(3): 7–12p.


Plasma renin activity was found to be correlated positively with muscle water content and the presence of oedema in rats with protein energy malnutrition, whereas the muscle potassium content showed a negative correlation with muscle water content. Malnourished rats also showed an inability to dispose of a water load. Nevertheless, the ability of malnourished rats to excrete injected hormones and to clear the plasma of bromosulphthalein proved to be normal. It is therefore concluded that, although the inability to balance consumption and excretion of water may in part be the result of increased effective plasma renin activity, the increased plasma concentration results from increased secretion rather than from decreased inactivation.


Background Diabetes mellitus (DM) is a risk factor for morbidity and mortality in patients with heart failure. The effect of DM on post–left ventricular assist device (LVAD) implantation outcomes is unclear. This study sought to investigate whether patients with DM had worse outcomes than patients without DM after LVAD implantation and whether LVAD support resulted in a better control of DM. Methods and Results We retrospectively reviewed 341 consecutive adults who underwent implantation of LVAD from 2007 to 2016. Patient characteristics and adverse events were studied and compared between patients with and without DM. One hundred thirty-one patients (38%) had DM. Compared with patients without DM, those with DM had higher rates of ischemic cardiomyopathy, LVAD implantation as destination therapy, and increased baseline body mass index. In a proportional hazards (Cox) model with adjustment for relevant covariates and median follow-up of 16.1 months, DM was associated with increased risk of all-cause mortality (hazard ratio, 1.73; 95% confidence interval: 1.18–2.53; P=0.005) and increased risk of nonfatal LVAD-related complications, including a composite of stroke, pump thrombosis, and device infection (hazard ratio, 2.1; 95% confidence interval: 1.35–3.18; P=0.001). Preoperative hemoglobin A1c was not significantly associated with mortality or adverse events among patients with DM. LVAD implantation resulted in a remarkable decrease in hemoglobin A1c levels (7.4±1.9 pre-LVAD versus 6.0±1.5 and 6.3±1.4 after 3 and 12 months post-LVAD, respectively; P<0.0001) and a significant reduction in requirements of DM medications. Conclusions DM is associated with increased rates of all-cause mortality and major adverse events despite favorable glycemic control after LVAD implantation.


ABSTRACT This study tested the hypothesis that tissue factor pathway inhibitor (TFPI) would improve mortality and morbidity evoked by peritonitis-induced bacteremia in pigs. Secondarily, it sought to determine if TFPI treatment would attenuate cardiodynamic abnormalities produced by this septic model. 32 pigs were chronically instrumented with intracardiac transducers to measure left ventricular pressure and diameter, pulmonary and aortic pressures, and cardiac output. At least 5 days after surgery to implant transducers, basal cardiovascular readings and blood samples were obtained. Using a randomized, blinded study design, either purified, reconstituted TFPI (1 mg/kg bolus, 10 mg/kg/min for 48 h), placebo (arginine buffer), or saline was administered to pigs immediately after Escherichia coli 0111.B4 (3.0–11 ± 109 colony-forming U/kg)-laden fibrin clots were implanted intraperitoneally, producing peritonitis and bacteremia. Pigs did not receive antibiotics or supportive therapy. No significant differences in primary or secondary endpoints were noted between the arginine and saline groups, so these data were combined into a control group (N = 20). 5 of 12 TFPI pigs survived (42%), while 5 of 20 control pigs survived (25%); this difference was not significant (p = .714, Fisher's exact test). TFPI treatment augmented cardiac output in surviving pigs, but did not affect any other cardiovascular performance variable (heart rate, % diameter shortening, or systemic and pulmonary vascular resistance). In controls, peritonitis induced rapid increase in plasma tumor necrosis factor-± (428 ± 771 to 5,933 ± 559 pg/mL at 2 h) and interleukin-8 (180 ± 153 to 1,393 ± 145 pg/mL at 2 h). TFPI treatment significantly attenuated cytokine responses to sepsis, reducing peak tumor necrosis factor-± to 2,103 ± 813 pg/mL and reducing peak interleukin-8 levels to 534 ± 211 pg/mL at 2 h (p < .05, Tukey test, two-way ANOVA). In conclusion, TFPI treatment attenuated important mediator components of the inflammatory response but did not provide significant survival benefit.


A logical key hierarchy (LKH) based key managementapproach is the most common way to manage a group keywith less rekeying overhead. However, the LKH approach causes inefficiency of rekeying the group key in mobile cellular networks since it does not consider the characteristics of the networks, such as the cell-based network topology and the user's mobility. This paper proposes an efficient and practical group key management scheme dedicated to the mobile cellular networks. This new approach can achieve better performance with less management overhead than other currently available schemes, by the cell-based decentralization of key management functions. Through comparisons with other possible approaches, it is shown that the proposed scheme can obtain much better performance in terms of the communication overhead.


This position paper argues that the Web 2.0 phenomenon is an important object of study for information systems research, and that a social informatics approach to understanding Web 2.0 is particularly relevant and useful. We discuss Wikipedia as an example of empirical research on Web 2.0 that can help bridge the divide between academic and popular discourse on new technology movements.


This forthcoming book chapter makes three arguments. First, it argues that the conceptual division between administrative and constitutional law is quite porous, and that along many dimensions, administrative law can be considered more constitutional in character than constitutions. Administrative law is more enduring and at least as constraining as are constitutions. Second, it shows that written constitutions do relatively little to legally constrain the administrative state. Rather, their role is to establish the broader structural apparatus of governance and accountability, in which the bureaucracy is the great unspoken. This leaves administrative law as a relatively free-standing field characterized by great flexibility and endurance, features that are usually thought to be more embodied in constitutions. Third, the chapter concludes that the exercise of comparison helps to expose the limits of written constitutions, and to call for greater attention to comparative administrative law as a feature of the unwritten constitution of nation states.


This article is an introduction to many of the interesting features of PegaSys, an experimental system that encourages and facilitates extensive use of graphical images as formal, machine- processable documentation. Unlike most other systems that use graphics to describe programs, the main purpose of PegaSys is to facilitate the explanation of program designs. What is particularly interesting about PegaSys is its ability to: (1) check whether pictures are syntactically meaningful, (2) enforce design rules throughout the hierarchical decomposition of a design, and (3) determine whether a program meets its pictorial documentation. Much of the power of PegaSys stems from its ability to represent and reason about different kinds of pictures within a single logical framework. Excerpts from a working session with PegaSys are used to illustrate the basic style of interaction as well as the three PegaSys capabilities.


The determination of the dominant factor for the enantioselectivity and reactivity of lipase-catalyzed reactions of binaphthyl compounds is of wide concern. To understand the stereo-dependent behavior of 2,2-binaphthyl compounds towards lipase, we established a platform for effectively evaluating the reactivity and enantioselectivity of lipase towards binaphthyl compounds by investigating the binding interactions between substrate and lipase. Penicillium expansum lipase (PEL) and three 2-amino-2′-hydroxy-1,1′-binaphthyl compounds (NBs) with different linker lengths were selected as the model lipase and substrates, respectively, in this study. The key interaction parameters such as binding affinities, binding modes, and thermodynamic parameters between NBs and PEL were determined for the first time, and the results revealed that the substrate–lipase binding interaction is a prerequisite for successful lipase-catalyzed reaction. The effect of binding discrepancies of NBs with different alkyl chain lengths on lipase reactivity and enantioselectivity was also unveiled. From the analytical results of NB–PEL binding interactions, a PEL-catalyzed two-step resolution strategy was further established and optimized for the gram-scale synthesis of optically pure NB. The investigation on the molecular interaction between NBs and PEL showed great promise for rationally guiding the synthesis of binaphthyl derivatives that are suitable for efficient optical resolution by the commercially available lipase.


Approximately 2,500 cases of systemic meningococcal infections are reported to the National Center for Disease Control in Atlanta each year. Meningococcal endocarditis (ME) is, however, a quite rare disease with a total of 24 cases cited in the last published review in 1946. 1 To our knowledge, there has been no prior report of Neisseria meningitidis which involved an artifical valve prosthesis. The unusual fulminant course associated with this organism and the potential chance of antibiotic control stimulated this patient report. Patient Summary A 58-year-old white woman was admitted for the third time to Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke's Medical Center on March 23, 1969, because of increasing weakness and easy fatigability. She had developed rheumatic fever when she was a child and had three recurrent acute attacks of rheumatic fever before she was 28 years old. She did well until three years prior to admission when she developed progressive dyspnea on exertion,


PURPOSE
Intravitreal injection of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), ciliary neurotrophic factor (CNTF), or basic fibroblast growth factor (FGF2) promotes survival of photoreceptors exposed to various types of insults, but it is not known if these survival-promoting effects occur by direct action of the factors on photoreceptors or indirectly through the activation of other cells. In this study, the authors have sought to address this issue by determining which cells in the retina show evidence of activated intracellular signaling pathways acutely and at longer time points after intravitreal injection of these agents.

METHODS
Retinas were removed from C57BL/6J mice at 1, 6, or 24 hours after intravitreal injection of 1 microg of human BDNF, rat CNTF, human FGF2, or human transforming growth factor-alpha (TGFalpha), and immunohistochemically stained for phosphorylated extracellular signal-regulated kinase (pERK), phosphorylated cAMP responsive element binding protein (pCREB), or c-fos. Retinal organ cultures were incubated with 10 ng/ml of BDNF, CNTF, FGF2, or TGFalpha for 10 or 30 minutes or 1, 3, or 6 hours and then immunohistochemically stained for pERK, pCREB, or c-fos.

RESULTS
Intravitreal injection of BDNF, CNTF, or FGF2 resulted in a rapid increase in pERK immunoreactivity in Müller cells and a rapid increase in c-fos immunoreactivity in Müller, amacrine, and ganglion cells. Immunoreactivity for pERK and c-fos returned to baseline in all retinal cells at 6 or 24 hours after injection, but there was increased staining for glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP) in Müller cells at these time points. At no time after injection was there any staining for pERK or c-fos in photoreceptors. Similarly, retinal explants treated with FGF2, BDNF, or CNTF showed increased staining for pCREB, pERK, and c-fos in cells of the inner retina, but not photoreceptors.

CONCLUSIONS
These data support the hypothesis that BDNF, CNTF, and FGF2 exert their effects on photoreceptors by acting indirectly through activation of Müller cells and perhaps other nonphotoreceptor cells.


Cancer leaves important consequences in the shape, function and esthetics of the patient, especially when it is cancer of the oral cavity or upper aero-digestive tract. Although reconstruction with local and microvascular flaps is sometimes a viable option, maxillofacial rehabilitation with osseointegrated implants is a well-reported treatment alternative with a high success rate. The main advantages in this modality of rehabilitation are the decrease in biological and economic costs, simplifying the management of these defects by reducing surgical intervention, hospitalization time, postoperative morbidity and treatment time. There are several classification systems; however, there is no classification system that has accurately described the maxillofacial defect under a surgical, prosthetic and reconstructive approach with osseointegrated implants. The purpose of this study is to guide professionals in decision-making for maxillofacial rehabilitation using osseointegrated implants located in the anatomical buttresses of the maxillofacial region.


Objectives: To construct new reference charts and equations for fetal biparietal diameter (BPD), head circumference (HC), abdominal circumference (AC) and femur length (FL) using a large sample of fetuses examined at 15–40 weeks in France. To compare this new reference with previous ones. Materials and methods: The study data were obtained from a population of pregnancies undergoing ultrasound examination over a continuous one-year period. Exclusion criteria were: known abnormal karyotype or congenital malformation, multiple pregnancies, no first trimester dating based on crown-rump length No exclusion was made on the basis of abnormal biometry or birth weight. For each measurement, separate regression models were fitted to estimate both the mean and standard deviation at each gestational age. Results: Complete biometric measurements were obtained in 19 647 fetuses. New charts and reference equations are presented for BPD, HC, AC and FL. Prediction intervals for the new reference were comparable to those of previous references, whereas there were some difference in the predicted centiles among references. Conclusion: We have presented new French reference charts and equations for fetal biometry. They can be easily used to compute centiles and Z-scores, to control quality of biometric assessment as well as to evaluate their performance as compared to other references.


IMAGINARY started as a math art exhibition by the Mathematisches Forschungsinstitut Oberwolfach and evolved into an open source platform for interactive math exhibits. This paper presents hands-on advice on how to make an exhibition using the platform and covers topics like team, budget, venue, production, media work and guidance. It is based on our experience with more than 80 IMAGINARY exhibitions in 20 countries. Most of them were organized independently by universities, research institutes, museums and schools.


The present study investigated the effects of biodiesel blending under a wide range of intake oxygen concentration levels in a diesel engine. This study attempted to identify the lowest biodiesel blending rate that achieves acceptable levels of nitric oxides (NOx), soot, and coefficient of variation in the indicated mean effective pressure (COVIMEP). Biodiesel blending was to be minimized in order to reduce the fuel penalty associated with the biodiesels lower caloric value. Engine experiments were performed in a 1-liter single-cylinder diesel engine at an engine speed of 1400 rev/min under a medium load condition. The blend rate and intake oxygen concentration were varied independently of each other at a constant intake pressure of 200 kPa. The biodiesel blend rate varied from 0% (B000) to 100% biodiesel (B100) at a 20% increment. The intake oxygen level was adjusted from 8 to 19% by volume (vol %) in order to embrace both conventional and low-temperature combustion (LTC) operations. A fixed injection duration of 788 μs at a fuel rail pressure of 160 MPa exhibited a gross indicated mean effective pressure (IMEP) between 750 kPa and 910 kPa, depending on the intake oxygen concentration.The experimental results indicated that the intake oxygen level had to be below 10 vol% to achieve the indicated specific NOx (ISNOx) below 0.2g/kWhr with the B000 fuel. However, a substantial soot increase was exhibited at such a low intake oxygen level. Biodiesel blending reduced NOx until the blending rate reached 60% with reduced in-cylinder temperature due to lower total energy release. As a result, 60%-biodiesel blended diesel (B060) achieved NOx, soot, and COVIMEP of 0.2 g/kWhr, 0.37 filter smoke number (FSN), and 0.5, respectively, at an intake oxygen concentration of 14 vol%. The corresponding indicated thermal efficiency was 43.2%.Copyright © 2014 by ASME


Modern conflict-driven clause-learning (CDCL) Boolean SAT solvers provide efficient automatic analysis of real-world feature models (FM) of systems ranging from cars to operating systems. It is well-known that solver-based analysis of real-world FMs scale very well even though SAT instances obtained from such FMs are large, and the corresponding analysis problems are known to be NP-complete. To better understand why SAT solvers are so effective, we systematically studied many syntactic and semantic characteristics of a representative set of large real-world FMs. We discovered that a key reason why large real-world FMs are easy-toanalyze is that the vast majority of the variables in these models are unrestricted, i.e., the models are satisfiable for both true and false assignments to such variables under the current partial assignment. Given this discovery and our understanding of CDCL SAT solvers, we show that solvers can easily find satisfying assignments for such models without too many backtracks relative to the model size, explaining why solvers scale so well. Further analysis showed that the presence of unrestricted variables in these real-world models can be attributed to their high-degree of variability. Additionally, we experimented with a series of well-known nonbacktracking simplifications that are particularly effective in solving FMs. The remaining variables/clauses after simplifications, called the core, are so few that they are easily solved even with backtracking, further strengthening our conclusions. In contrast to our findings, previous research characterizes the difficulty of analyzing randomly-generated FMs in terms of treewidth. Our experiments suggest that the difficulty of analyzing real-world FMs cannot be explained in terms of treewidth.


Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is now recognized as an extremely serious global public health problem. The U.S. Agency for International Development--supported Rational Pharmaceutical Management Plus Program (RPM Plus) of Management Sciences for Health is currently supporting various activities to help contain this problem including an activity aimed at assisting in-country stakeholders to mount a country-level AMR advocacy and containment program. At the request of the Drug Administration and Control Authority of Ethiopia RPM Plus sent a team of Maria Miralles and Mohan Joshi to Addis Ababa in February--March 2006 to assist the local partners in initiating such a country-level AMR program. This report describes the activities accomplished during the trip including the First AMR Stakeholders Meeting that was held on March 2 2006 in Addis Ababa. (authors)


The initial event in decompression sickness is the separation of gas from solution because of supersaturation. If this event gives rise to immediate symptoms, recompression is remarkably effective. This end-point is characteristic of joint pain, that is, Type 1 decompression sickness. Unfortunately the onset of serious Type 2 decompression sickness may be insidious and the delay may be associated with blood-brain barrier dysfunction. Pressure is less effective in the resolution of this problem than a raised partial pressure of oxygen. Standard therapy using oxygen may be associated with worsening of symptoms and air tables with recurrence. Recompression to 4 ata and the use of a mixture of 50% oxygen and 50% helium offers a good working compromise in the treatment of both serious decompression sickness and gas embolism arising in air diving, avoiding the need for a differential diagnosis. Only oxygen or helium and oxygen mixtures should be used in the therapy of decompression sickness in helium and oxygen diving. When therapy has been delayed, intravenous fluids and steroids are important adjuncts.


During the careers of many current and soon-to-be dental practitioners, one-in-five residents of the U.S. will be 65-plus years of age. Although the current population of seniors has limited dental insurance coverage, older Americans are increasing their use of services. Demographic variations are reviewed in terms of the need for services, dental visit patterns and expenditures for services. A challenge is presented to prepare practitioners for the care of this burgeoning population.


Despite valuable research regarding multicultural encounters in sport psychology settings, the mechanisms by which culture operates, including the ways that it is transmitted and learned, and the specific processes though which it exerts influence upon behavior, remain poorly understood. Research also has not addressed how a dimension of experience that is so fundamental could remain so transparent and reside so consistently outside the awareness of researchers, clinicians, and clients. Recent contributions to cultural psychology using an interactivist model provide a theoretical perspective through which clinical sport psychologists could conceptualize these challenging issues and address the complex behaviors observed in cross-cultural contexts. Interactivism offers a framework for investigating the internally inconsistent "polyphonic," or multivoiced, nature of the self. In doing so, it highlights the need for investigative methods that can account for frequent discrepancies between implicit attitudes ...


In this work we present a simple end-to-end trainable machine learning system capable of realistically simulating driving experiences. This can be used for verification of self-driving system performance without relying on expensive and time-consuming road testing. In particular, we frame the simulation problem as a Markov Process, leveraging deep neural networks to model both state distribution and transition function. These are trainable directly from the existing raw observations without the need of any handcrafting in the form of plant or kinematic models. All that is needed is a dataset of historical traffic episodes. Our formulation allows the system to construct never seen scenes that unfold realistically reacting to the self-driving car's behaviour. We train our system directly from 1,000 hours of driving logs and measure both realism, reactivity of the simulation as the two key properties of the simulation. At the same time we apply the method to evaluate performance of a recently proposed state-of-the-art ML planning system [1] trained from human driving logs. We discover this planning system is prone to previously unreported causal confusion issues that are difficult to test by non-reactive simulation. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that directly merges highly realistic data-driven simulations with a closed loop evaluation for self-driving vehicles. We make the data, code, and pre-trained models publicly available to further stimulate simulation development.


Objective: Racial and ethnic minority (REM) youth with type 1 diabetes (T1D) are less likely to use diabetes technology and are at higher risk for adverse short-term outcomes. Diabetes distress (DD) , associated with less engagement with management and elevated hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) , may be an additional mediator of this disparity. However, no studies have specifically evaluated DD in REM youth. This study aims to evaluate racial and ethnic disparities in DD and diabetes technology use in adolescents with T1D.
 Method: We recruited adolescents with T1D (age 13-17) and their parent to complete an online survey. Adolescents were categorized by self-report into Non-Hispanic White (NHW) or REM groups.
 Result: Of 45 adolescent surveys completed, 62% identified as NHW and 38% as REM. REM adolescents were less likely to use both a continuous glucose monitor and an insulin pump (p=0.001) and had higher HbA1c (p<0.001) . There was a similarly high prevalence of DD (84%) in both groups of adolescents. Parents had a much lower rate of DD (14%, p<0.001) , similar in both racial/ethnic groups.
 Conclusion: We found disparities in technology use and HbA1c between NHW and REM adolescents. However, the similarly high rate of clinically significant DD confirms the need to address DD to decrease the burden of diabetes and improve outcomes in all racial/ethnic groups.

 A.Wilcox: None. S.Mencher: None. L.M.Nally: Other Relationship; Novo Nordisk. S.A.Weinzimer: Consultant; Dompé, Research Support; Abbott Diabetes, Speaker's Bureau; Abbott Diabetes, Dexcom, Inc.


Deformable registration consists of finding the best dense correspondence between two different images. Many algorithms have been published, but the clinical application was made difficult by the high calculation time needed to solve the optimisation problem. Deep learning overtook this limitation by taking advantage of GPU calculation and the learning process. However, many deep learning methods do not take into account desirable properties respected by classical algorithms. In this paper, we present MICS, a novel deep learning algorithm for medical imaging registration. As registration is an ill-posed problem, we focused our algorithm on the respect of different properties: inverse consistency, symmetry and orientation conservation. We also combined our algorithm with a multi-step strategy to refine and improve the deformation grid. While many approaches applied registration to brain MRI, we explored a more challenging body localisation: abdominal CT. Finally, we evaluated our method on a dataset used during the Learn2Reg challenge, allowing a fair comparison with published methods.


Departing from past research on managers' responses to employee voice, we propose and examine a nonlinear linkage between promotive/prohibitive voice and managers' evaluations of voicers (i.e., manager-rated voicers' promotability and overall performance). Drawing from social persuasion theory, we theorize that managers tend to give more positive evaluations to employees who engage in a moderate frequency of promotive/prohibitive voice than those who either rarely speak up or speak up very frequently. In Study 1, based on a sample from a Chinese bank, we found that leader-member exchange quality (LMX) moderated the inverted U-shaped linkage of prohibitive voice with manager-rated promotability of voicers, whereas the frequency of promotive voice was not related to promotability, irrespective of levels of LMX. In Study 2, using employee-reported voice frequency, rather than the manager-rated measures adopted in Study 1, we largely replicated the main findings of Study 1 based on a sample from an information technology firm in the United States. In Study 3, using another U.S. sample, from a financial services firm, we found that manager-perceived voice constructiveness mediated the curvilinear interactive effect of prohibitive voice (rather than promotive voice) and LMX on managers' evaluations of employees' overall performance.


This study examines the impact of unions on wages and employment using data from Uruguay in a period when unions were banned (1973-1984), then legalized with tripartite bargaining (1984-1991) followed by industry-wide or firm-specific bargaining (1992-1997). The relationship between wages and employment shifted significantly across these periods as evidenced by recursive residuals, which show structural shifts in five of six industries, with the shifts coming at the same time as the regime changes. Wages are exogenous to employment before 1985, but not afterwards. Wage elasticity and the employment-output elasticity fell sharply after 1984. Unions significantly raised wages in 1985-1992, but afterwards the change in bargaining structure and increased openness led to concessions. Starting in 1985, workers in unionized industries were less likely to be laid off than workers in nonunion industries.


Drought and drying of perennial streams plays a central role in determining the structure of in-stream communities, decreasing taxa richness and abundance and changing trophic organisation. Further, flow cessation can increase spatial β-diversity of macroinvertebrate communities across disconnected sites. It has been hypothesised that the hyporheic zone may act as a refugium for benthic macroinvertebrates during low flow and flow cessation, but evidence remains equivocal. We explored hyporheic and surface benthic macroinvertebrate community changes associated with low flow and flow cessation conditions during a supra-seasonal drought on two normally perennial rivers: the Cotter and Queanbeyan Rivers (Canberra, ACT). Surface benthic and hyporheic samples were collected from these two rivers and four associated tributary streams across a drying gradient during dry conditions and after flow recovery to test whether macroinvertebrates in perennial streams utilise the hyporheic zone as a refugium and whether there is greater variability in the macroinvertebrate community at sites experiencing flow cessation compared with wetter sites. Low flow had no impact on macroinvertebrate taxa richness or density in either surface benthic or hyporheic habitats, whereas density and taxa richness declined during streambed drying, suggesting that the hyporheic zone did not provide a refugium for some taxa during these dry conditions. Spatial β-diversity peaked at dry sites, likely in response to the broad range of environmental conditions that may differ between refuges and sites, but decreased after flow recovery. Refuges in perennial streams appear more vulnerable to human disturbances during dry periods because a loss of suitable refuges can affect the ability of some macroinvertebrate taxa to recolonise after flow recovery.


For small-scale RC structure model in earthquake simulation test, the material behavior of the model is hard to resemble the prototype well so that the model cannot simulate correctly the nonlinear performance of the prototype. On the basis of the dynamic similitude of mechanical behavior between common concrete and micro-concrete which derive from mechanical behavior tests, the simplified equivalent dynamic similitude relations, which are applicable to the nonlinear performance simulation with small-scale RC structure models in the earthquake simulation tests, have been proposed. By the numerical simulation of earthquake simulation tests and the deviation analysis, the dynamic simulation experimental method has been verified. In addition, for small-scaled RC model, to consider the similitude harmony between concrete and reinforcement used in the model, by adjusting the reinforcement and stirrup, or the effective section height (h0) and hoop spacing etc., simple element testing, shaking table test and numerical simulation were carried out to verify this model design method. Thus, it's realizable that the small-scaled RC model can simulate correctly the nonlinear performance of the prototype.


This paper is based on the case study of a blind man, Shambhu, who is found adhere to ARV drugs. This case study was conducted by the author when she was working as ART counselor in ART (Anti retroviral therapy) Centre, Surat. More than 95% of adherence of a blind man created a quest in an author to know more about it in greater details so she conducted the case study of a Shambhu. This paper portraits personal, professional, marital, medical and socio-economic condition of Shambhu and in last it uncovers the secret of Shambhu's perfect adherence which is followed by remarks which can be helpful to other HIV positive people who can't be adhere to ARV drugs yet they are not having severe physical problem like Shambhu. Hope, this case study will be helpful to PLHA clients who are on ART and cannot adhere to drugs.


In this paper the weak completeness of certain sequence spaces is examined. In particular, we show that each of the sequence spaces c0 and 9, 1 < p < c, is a Banach space. A Riesz representation for the dual space of each of these sequence spaces is given. A Riesz representation theorem for Hilbert space is also proven. In the third chapter we conclude that any reflexive space is weakly (sequentially) complete. We give 01 as an example of a non-reflexive space that is weakly complete. Two examples, c0 and YJ, are given of spaces that fail to be weakly complete.


From the Publisher:
Beard & McKie are back. The author and the illustrator who created Sailing (a New York Times bestseller with 710,000 copies in print), as well as Golfing, Fishing, and other well-defined dictionaries--which together have over 2.3 million copies in print--now turn their unflinchingly funny eye to America's newest obsession, computing. For frustrated Web surfers, confused number crunchers, for the crazed the possessed, and the befuddled, it makes perfect fun of the machine we love to hate.
Computing covers it all, from hardware (any portion of a computer system that you can actually smack, thump, slam, punch, bash, whack, or clobber) to program ( a set of instructions for converting informational input into an emotional outburst). There are technical terms--Web browser (an Internet navigation program that gives computer users instant access to more than one billion advertisements); cultural phenomena--techie (a nerd with a Porsche); lingo--e-mail (a highly efficient method of wasting the countless working hours saved by the introduction of data-processing systems); and common words given new meaning in the computer age--instructions (a collection of Finnish proverbs with the words "User's Manual" printed on the cover).


As the scope and scale of network data grows, security practitioners and network operators are increasingly turning to automated data analysis methods to extract meaningful information. Underpinning these methods are distance metrics that represent the similarity between two values or objects. In this paper, we argue that many of the obvious distance metrics used to measure behavioral similarity among network hosts fail to capture the semantic meaning imbued by network protocols. Furthermore, they also tend to ignore long-term temporal structure of the objects being measured. To explore the role of these semantic and temporal characteristics, we develop a new behavioral distance metric for network hosts and compare its performance to a metric that ignores such information. Specifically, we propose semantically meaningful metrics for common data types found within network data, show how these metrics can be combined to treat network data as a unified metric space, and describe a temporal sequencing algorithm that captures long-term causal relationships. In doing so, we bring to light several challenges inherent in defining behavioral metrics for network data, and put forth a new way of approaching network data analysis problems. Our proposed metric is empirically evaluated on a dataset of over 30 million network flows, with results that underscore the utility of a holistic approach to network data analysis.


. The building design is a problem-solving process in which the demands of the customer are turned into a design job. Throughout the design process, several specialists from various fields cooperate to develop the final design. The key deliverables that are exchanged and passed over are the generated designs. However, no explanation of design intentions or evidence of argumentations behind the design decisions is included in the design deliverables. Design documentation helps with communication and coordination between designers and other domain experts and stakeholders. Proper design documentation also preserves and protects corporate design knowledge and makes it available for future design problems and projects. This paper presents the implementation of an add-in for Revit that features the concepts of so-called Explanation Tags and Design Episodes to digitally explain and document design rationale and decisions, and ultimately capture the tacit design knowledge. As an extra feature, the add-in also enables the export of design episodes to a Graph-Database (Neo4j) as well as CSV files for future reference and use. Subsequently, the goal is to search and query inside the graph database for similar designs that can solve and answer the new design tasks in the future. This paper contributes to the UN Sustainable Development Goals, namely SDG 9 & SDG 11 among others.


The main goal of the IPN Video Study is to systematically describe and analyse physics instruction and to investigate its relevance for understanding-oriented learning in the classroom. In the first phase of the IPN Video Study, various guidelines and instruments for data collection were developed and published. In the second phase of the project, a more elaborated approach was realised. This technical report provides an overview of all the tools and methods used in this study. It shows how to run a video study that analyses patterns of instruction and their impact on cognitive as well as motivational-affective learning outcomes. The report includes the documentation of the organisation and realisation of the IPN Video Study. In addition, it provides standardised guidelines for collecting video tapes. Moreover, the technical report presents standardised guidelines for the transcription of video tapes and describes the observation and coding procedures in detail. Finally, this volume reports scale documentations of all tests and questionnaires.


A pulsed pumped Yb-doped double-clad fiber (DCF) master-oscillator power amplifier (MOPA) at low repetition rate is reported. Seeded by a passive Q-switched Nd:YAG microchip laser, the fiber amplifier can generate 167-kW peak-power and 0.83-ns duration pulses at 200-Hz repetition rate. Because of the pulsed pump approach, the amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) and the spurious lasing between pulses are well avoided, and the repetition rate can be set freely from single-shot to 1 kHz. Peak power scaling limitations that arise from the fiber facet damage are discussed.


The authors studied the transformation of infraslow oscillations of brain potentials in 15 patients with neuroses during 50 sessions of hypnosis. The results of such studies permitted to distinguish some important traits in the changes of infraslow oscillations of brain potentials in different stages of hypnosis. It is concluded that a study of these changes during hypnosis may establish some correlations between the physiological state of the brain and the unconscious mental processes.


Care of elderly family members affects the welfare of the elderly and caregivers and has macroeconomic implications. In Eastern Europe, aging populations combined with under-developed care policy increase family care burdens, but the impact of care on labour force participation is understudied in this context. Using two waves of the Generations and Gender survey, we estimate the impact of care demand on paid employment in Bulgaria. We find that living with an elderly or disabled parent has a negative impact on employment for women and that this impact cannot be explained by reverse causality or unobserved individual characteristics. More developed care policy would benefit caregivers and would be likely to generate broader fiscal benefits.


Both Gauss-Seidel Iterative 3D deconvolution and Richardson-Lucy like
algorithms are used due to their stability and high quality results in high
noise microscopic medical image processing. An approach to determine the
difference between these two algorithms is presented in this paper. It is shown
that the convergence rate and the quality of these two algorithms are
influenced by the size of the point spread function (PSF). Larger PSF sizes
causes faster convergence but this effect falls off for larger sizes . It is
furthermore shown that the relaxation factor and the number of iterations are
influencing the convergence rate of the two algorithms. It has been found that
increasing relaxation factor and number of iterations improve convergence and
can reduce the error of the deblurred image. It also found that overrelaxation
converges faster than underrelaxation for small number of iterations. However,
it can be achieved smaller final error with under-relaxation. The choice of
underrelaxation factor and overrelaxation factor value are highly problem
specific and different from one type of images. In addition, when it comes to
3D iterative deconvolution, the influence of boundary conditions for these two
algorithms is discussed. Implementation aspects are discussed and it is
concluded that cache memory is vital for achieving a fast implementation of
iterative 3D deconvolution. A mix of the two algorithms have been developed and
compared with the previously mentioned Gauss-Seidel and the
Richardson-Lucy-like algorithms. The experiments indicate that, if the value of
the relaxation parameter is optimized, then the Richardson-Lucy-like algorithm
has the best performance for 3D iterative deconvolution.


This handbook was produced with the aim of providing students with an introduction to Old Irish literature as well as to the language. One of the notable Old Irish stories is used as the basic text. Examples of poems, and of the glosses, supplement it. All are thoroughly annotated. The grammatical information provided in these annotations is summarized in grammatical sections dealing with specific constructions and forms. The first fifty of these sections are descriptive; many of the same matters are discussed in the second fifty section from a historical point of view. A final glossary includes references to all words occurring in the texts. The apparatus was accordingly designed to permit a relatively easy approach to a very difficult language."


In this contribution, we propose and investigate a multiple-input-multiple-output space-division, code-division multiple-access (MIMO SCDMA) scheme. The main objective is to improve the capacity of the existing direct-sequence (DS)-CDMA systems, for example, for supporting an increased number of users, by deploying multiple transmit and receive antennas in the corresponding systems and by using some advanced transmission and detection algorithms. In the proposed MIMO SCDMA system, each user can be distinguished jointly by its spreading code signature and its unique channel impulse response (CIR) transfer function referred to as spatial signature. Hence, the number of users might be supported by the MIMO SCDMA system and the corresponding achievable performance are determined by the degrees of freedom provided by both the code signatures and the spatial signatures, as well as by how efficiently the degrees of freedom are exploited. Specifically, the number of users supported by the proposed MIMO SCDMA can be significantly higher than the number of chips per bit, owing to the employment of space-division. In this contribution, space-time spreading is employed for configuring the transmitted signals. Three types of low-complexity linear detectors, namely, correlation, decorrelating, and minimum mean-square error (MMSE) are considered for detecting the MIMO SCDMA signals. The bit-error rate performance of the MIMO SCDMA system associated with these linear detectors are evaluated by simulations, when assuming that the MIMO SCDMA signals are transmitted over multipath Rayleigh-fading channels. Our study and simulation results show that MIMO SCDMA assisted by multiuser detection is capable of facilitating joint space-time despreading, multipath combining, and receiver diversity combining, while simultaneously suppressing the multiuser interfering signals.


Although it is well known that atrial premature depolarizations (APDs) frequently lead to lengthening of the next cycle (returning cycle), it is usually not appreciated that shortening of the returning cycle (RC) can also occur. Moreover, the mechanism for these alterations is not clearly understood. APDs were therefore electrically induced in rabbit sinoatrial (SA) preparations, and four basic patterns of alteration in the SA nodal rhythm were observed. The type of change depended very much on the timing of the APD in the cycle. The atrial events, more often than not, failed to reflect the underlying SA nodal events. Thus, lengthened atrial RCs occurred in spite of shortened SA nodal RCs. This and other discrepancies indicate that the extracellular records of atrial activity do not faithfully reflect the events within the SA node and that information gathered from them should be interpreted with caution. Timing of the APD in the cycle, antegrade and retrograde SA conduction time, SA nodal action potential characteristics, and shifts in pacemaker sites are important in the determination of the altered SA nodal and atrial responses to APDs.


ABSTRACT
 An iniid fossil (Cetacea, Odontoceti) is reported based on a periotic found in the Codore Formation (late Miocene to middle Pliocene) of northwestern Venezuela. The marine sediments where the Codore dolphin was collected have yielded another cetacean and a diverse elasmobranch fauna. Cladistic analysis indicates a close relationship between the Codore dolphin and the extant Amazon River dolphin (Inia geoffrensis); key characteristics include a large cochlear portion that is dorsoventrally compressed and the extremely small size of the posterior process. High-resolution micro-computed tomography scans were used for the description and analysis of the bony labyrinth endocast. Geometric morphometric analysis of the bony labyrinth endocast places the Codore dolphin as intermediate between the La Plata dolphin (Pontoporia blainvillei) and Inia geoffrensis (principal component 1), but distinctive from both extant species (principal component 2). Comparisons of the depositional environment with cladistically informed reconstructions and inferences based on cochlear and vestibular anatomy suggest that the Codore dolphin had the flexibility to enter marine, brackish, and fluvial environments as some extant cetaceans do today (e.g., Pontoporia blainvillei).


AIM
To investigate the associations of hepatitis B virus (HBV) genotype with HBeAg and anti-HBe status, alanine aminotransferase (ALT) levels and HBV-DNA detection in different groups of HBV-infected patients in southwest Iran.

METHODS
A total of 89 HBsAg-positive serum samples were collected from the same number of patients. All sera were then investigated to determine HBV DNA and serological markers. For all the polymerase chain reaction (PCR)-positive samples, biochemical, histopathological assays and genotyping were also performed.

RESULTS
Genotype D was the only type of HBV found in different clinical forms of acute and chronic infections. There was a high prevalence of HBeAg-negative HBV-infected patients with chronic hepatitis (52.7%). Out of 55 patients with chronic hepatitis, seven (12.7%) were diagnosed with cirrhosis. A significant association between the presence of anti-HBe antibody and an increase in ALT level, among either HBeAg-negative (P = 0.01) or HBeAg-positive (P = 0.026) patients, was demonstrated. No significant differences were observed between the clinical outcomes of HBeAg-positive and -negative individuals (P = 0.24).

CONCLUSION
Genotype D has been recognized as the only type of HBV found in different clinical forms of HBV infections, including cirrhosis, among the residents of southwest Iran. Anti-HBe possibly plays a role in disease progression in some patients with chronic hepatitis, at least for a period of disease.


The latest version of the ANSI/NIST-ITL standard was published in November 2011 (AN-2011). In addition to specifying Record Types in traditional encoding, the standard includes the specification of National Information Exchange Model (NIEM) Extensible Markup Language (XML) encoding and an associated schema. The Computer Security Division of NIST/ITL developed a Conformance Test Architecture (CTA) and Test Suite (CTS) called BioCTS for AN-2011 NIEM XML designed to test implementations of AN-2011 NIEM XML encoded transactions. Validating the XML files to a schema may indicate that the contained data is formatted correctly and individual values are within allowable ranges, assuming that the requirements for that data have been documented in the schema file. However, schemas are not designed to test the internal consistency of implementations (i.e., testing for a relationship between two elements or structures within a transaction). These shortcomings of XML schema files for use in conformance testing necessitate that schemas be used only as a component of a complete testing solution. This complete solution (the test tool) ensures test coverage of requirements through a combination of schema validation and conformance tests of the data in the XML files. This document discusses the test software design including the XML Data Structures used and Classes implemented. It addresses the testing phases and the format of the test results; as well as the user interface and key usability features implemented in this version of the test tool. Details are provided on a modified schema that was required to be used in the tool in order to fully perform tests for all the requirements specified in the AN-2011 standard. Future development steps including support for the new version of the ANSI/NIST-ITL standard under development are also discussed.


Since 1990, the Human Development Index has revolutionized discussions about human development. However, it suffers from two deficiencies, which can now be mitigated: geographic incompleteness and insufficiently "on-target" representation of economy, knowledge, and "a long and healthy life" at the level of the individual. This report summarizes attempts to rectify those deficiencies. In addition, steady advances in attempts to characterize different aspects of the human condition have resulted in indicators, covering varying numbers of countries, on a wide variety of subjects. If one were challenged to create an index on the condition of people-centric Human Security such as the authors of the Human Development Index faced in 1990 and expanded qualitatively in 1994, one could now begin to do so – at least for the sake of discussion and resultant improvements. A prototype Human Security Index is presented and initially assessed here. This paper extends a paper (Hastings 2008) with additional data, and is designed to complement the Hastings (2009) on geographically extending the Human Development Index. Initial findings are consistent with those of some sustainability and governance indicators – that stereotypical material development needs to be harmonized by good governance aimed at peacefulness, fair circumstances to all people, long-term environmental sustainability. The data show that most countries are characterized (in the draft indices) by one or more relative strengths, and also one or more weaknesses, which might help them to focus on areas for improvements. Indeed, no country ranks above 0.800 (on a 0-1.000 scale as in the Human Development Index) in all components. Another initial result of this work is a form of documentation that GDP-"developed" economies are not necessarily highly developed societies, in terms of equitability, social fabric, or human security. These societal characteristics are arguably more important to contentment-happiness-satisfaction than raw GDP per capita. Where the Human Development Reports of United Nations Development Programme pushed the envelope significantly from GDP per capita to include health and education, the equitability and social fabric documentation now beginning can push the envelope even farther. Thanks to the work of many organizations, we may now begin to further characterize human security and societal development, and perhaps rectify challenges faced by societies in such dimensions of life.


The primary aim pursued by the preparation of the separation membrane is to make the membrane thinner as well as have no defects. The field-flow fractionation deposition is a new molding technology which can overcome the traditional disadvantages, such as multi-preparation, to the preparation of a great area of the separation membrane with no defects. Therefore the main ingredients which influence the appearance and performance of titanium membrane layers are investigated by a scanning electricity mirror (SEM) as well as a porous material testing instrument: powder performance prepared and confected; selection of supporting body; sintering system such as temperature and time. It is shown that the membrane thickness can be controlled at 50μm or so.


In this work, we have reported an eco-friendly and cost-effective technique of synthesis of TiO2@Carbon nanocomposites (TCNs) material by a facile solvothermal treatment of banana (Musa balbisiana) bract extract. Yellow green photoluminescence (PL) feature and efficient catalytic activities of green synthesized TCNs have been demonstrated. X-ray diffraction (XRD) data has revealed the simultaneous presence of rutile and anatase phases of TiO2 in the synthesized TCNs. The presence of amorphous carbon and TiO2 is also confirmed by Raman spectroscopy. The light emission characteristics of TCNs are studied by PL emission spectroscopy which has confirmed the presence of defect levels caused by oxygen vacancies and surface hydroxyl groups localized within the band-gap.The photo-catalytic performance of the synthesized material has been systematically evaluated by observing the degradation of Methylene Blue (MB) dye under the incidence of ultraviolet-visible (UV-Vis)/visible light irradiation and manifested a superior UV-Vis light photo-catalytic activity far over the commercial TiO2 powder (CTP) under the same experimental conditions. A relatively higher electrochemical performance and 52 times larger cathodic current density is obtained in TCNs in compared to that of CTP. TCNs exhibit extremely high hydrogen evolution reaction catalytic activity with very small onset over potential. Copyright © 2017 VBRI Press.


In this paper, we consider a cognitive setting under the context of cooperative communications, where the cognitive radio (CR) user is assumed to be a self-organized relay for the network. The CR user and the primary user (PU) are assumed to be energy harvesters. The CR user cooperatively relays some of the undelivered packets of the PU. Specifically, the CR user stores a fraction of the undelivered primary packets in a relaying queue (buffer). It manages the flow of the undelivered primary packets to its relaying queue using the appropriate actions over time slots. Moreover, it has the decision of choosing the used queue for channel accessing at idle time slots (slots where the PU's queue is empty). It is assumed that one data packet transmission dissipates one energy packet. The optimal policy changes according to the primary and CR users arrival rates to the data and energy queues as well as the channels connectivity. The CR user saves energy for the PU by taking the responsibility of relaying the undelivered primary packets. It optimally organizes its own energy packets to maximize its payoff as time progresses.


Feeding 9 billion people in 2050 will require sustainable development of all water resources, both surface and subsurface. Yet, little is known about the irrigation potential of hillside shallow aquifers in many highland settings in sub‐Saharan Africa that are being considered for providing irrigation water during the dry monsoon phase for smallholder farmers. Information on the shallow groundwater being available in space and time on sloping lands might aid in increasing food production in the dry monsoon phase. Therefore, the research objective of this work is to estimate potential groundwater storage as a potential source of irrigation water for hillside aquifers where lateral subsurface flow is dominant. The research was carried out in the Robit Bata experimental watershed in the Lake Tana basin which is typical of many undulating watersheds in the Ethiopian highlands. Farmers have excavated more than 300 hand dug wells for irrigation. We used 42 of these wells to monitor water table fluctuation from April 16, 2014 to December 2015. Precipitation and runoff data were recorded for the same period. The temporal groundwater storage was estimated using two methods: one based on the water balance with rainfall as input and baseflow and evaporative losses leaving the watershed as outputs; the second based on the observed rise and fall of water levels in wells. We found that maximum groundwater storage was at the end of the rain phase in September after which it decreased linearly until the middle of December due to short groundwater retention times. In the remaining part of the dry season period, only wells located close to faults contained water. Thus, without additional water sources, sloping lands can only be used for significant irrigation inputs during the first 3 months out of the 8 months long dry season.


The Internet and Digital Economy track focuses on the ways in which the Internet affects people, groups, organizations, and societies (e.g., Markets, social networks), as well as fundamental issues in the development and operation of the Internet and Internet applications.


1. Arteriolar diameter was measured using an optical method in preparations of guinea‐pig submucosal plexus in vitro. Electrical stimulation of one or more neurones in ganglia of the submucosal plexus causes a cholinergic vasodilatation in normal animals. The vasomotor innervation to the arterioles was studied in guinea‐pigs in which the extrinsic nerves to the intestine had been removed. Tissues were processed for immunohistochemistry after the in vitro experiments. 2. Extrinsic denervation resulted in complete loss of catecholamine fluorescence, NPY (neuropeptide Y) and CGRP (calcitonin gene‐related peptide) immunofluorescence around the blood vessels and no neurogenic vasoconstriction was observed up to 60 days post‐denervation. Vasodilatation in response to ganglionic stimulation was increased; smaller arterioles (outside diameter less than 40 microns) showed a greater enhancement of neurogenic vasodilatation than larger arterioles. 3. Nerve‐evoked vasodilatations were only partially inhibited by muscarinic antagonists at 30‐60 days after extrinsic denervations. 4. The non‐cholinergic neurogenic vasodilatation was abolished by the substance P antagonists, spantide, [D‐Arg1, D‐Pro2, D‐Trp7.9, Leu11]substance P and [D‐Arg1, D‐Phe5, D‐Trp7.9, Leu11]substance P. These antagonists did not alter the cholinergic vasodilatation in normal or extrinsically denervated arterioles. 5. Exogenous substance P dilated all submucosal arterioles; the concentration which produced half‐maximal vasodilatations was 2.5 mM in both normal and extrinsically denervated arterioles. Substance P antagonists inhibited the vasodilatation caused by substance P at concentrations similar to those needed to block nerve‐mediated vasodilatation. 6. There was a strong correlation between the finding of non‐cholinergic vasodilatation in response to ganglionic stimulation, and the presence of substance P‐immunoreactive fibres running from ganglion to arteriole. This correlation did not exist for VIP (vasoactive intestinal peptide). 7. These results suggest that intrinsic intestinal substance P‐containing nerve fibres supply submucosal arterioles after sympathetic efferents and sensory afferents are removed. Stimulation of these nerves releases substance P to produce arteriolar dilatation.


Sentence retrieval is an important NLP application for English as a Second Language (ESL) learners. ESL learners are familiar with web search engines, but generic web search results may not be adequate for composing documents in a specific domain. However, if we build our own search system specialized to a domain, it may be subject to the data sparseness problem. Recently proposed word2vec partially addresses the data sparseness problem, but fails to extract sentences relevant to queries owing to the modeling of the latent intent of the query. Thus, we propose a method of retrieving example sentences using kernel embeddings and N-gram windows. This method implicitly models latent intent of query and sentences, and alleviates the problem of noisy alignment. Our results show that our method achieved higher precision in sentence retrieval for ESL in the domain of a university press release corpus, as compared to a previous unsupervised method used for a semantic textual similarity task.


The need for sustainable transport is increasingly recognized and receives more and more attention. Cities face the challenge to enhance the quality of urban environment reducing traffic congestion, pollution and road accidents. Moreover, transport charging policies consist a basic tool for sustainable mobility while they are increasingly applied in urban centers. The objective of the present research is to investigate drivers' acceptance of environmental transport charging policies with emphasis on environmental charging (annual card) for private cars access in Athens center. In order to achieve this objective, data were collected through a questionnaire survey, using stated preference methodology while a binary logistic regression model was developed to determine the acceptance of car access card in the center of Athens. The results demonstrate that annual card cost and travel time saving are the main factors for the acceptance of the annual card. Furthermore, men and young people are more likely to accept the annual card while several other parameters such as vehicle's age and usage, vehicle's engine capacity and driver's perception of environmental pollutants affect policy's acceptance and should be taken into account by policymakers when developing and implementing similar environmental mobility strategies.


The replacement of animals in acute systemic toxicity testing remains a considerable challenge. Only animal data are currently accepted by regulators, including data generated by reduction and refinement methods. The development of Integrated Approaches to Testing and Assessment (IATA) is hampered by an insufficient understanding of the numerous toxicity pathways that lead to acute systemic toxicity. Therefore, central to our work has been the collection and evaluation of the mechanistic information on eight organs identified as relevant for acute systemic toxicity (nervous system, cardiovascular system, liver, kidney, lung, blood, gastrointestinal system and immune system). While the nervous and cardiovascular systems are the most frequent targets, no clear relationship emerged between specific mechanisms of target organ toxicity and the level (category) of toxicity. From a list of 114 chemicals with acute oral in vivo and in vitro data, 98 were identified with target organ specific effects, of which 93% were predicted as acutely toxic by the 3T3 neutral red uptake cytotoxicity assay and 6% as non-toxic. This analysis will help to prioritise the development of adverse outcome pathways for acute oral toxicity, which will support the assessment of chemicals using mechanistically informed IATA.


We collected 50 three-toed box turtles (Terrapene carolina triunguis) from 9 counties of Arkansas and 4 counties of Oklahoma, and examined their feces for coccidial parasites. Nine of 24 (38%) turtles from Arkansas and 8 of 26 (31%) from Oklahoma were found to be passing oocysts of Eimeria ornata. This represents two new geographic distributional records for this coccidian. Measurements of individual isolates of E. ornata as well as morphological characteristics are provided with comparison to its original description and to another Terrapene coccidian, Eimeria carri. In addition, we noted an adelid pseudoparasite being passed by a single T. c. triunguis from Oklahoma that likely represents a parasite of arthropods.


Geometric set operations play an integral role in systems for CAD/CAM, for robot planning, and for modeling objects such as underground formations from empirical data. Two major issues in the implementation of geometric set operations are efficiency in the search for geometric intersections and effectiveness in the treatment of singular intersection cases. This article presents an algorithm for geometric set operations on planar polyhedral nonmanifold objects that addresses both these issues. First, an efficient search for geometric intersections is obtained by localizing the search to small regions of object space through a cellular subdivision scheme using the polytree data structure. Second, an effective treatment of singular intersection cases is obtained by mapping each singular intersection occurring in a region into one of a small set of cases.


The formation of many ice crystal halos can be visualized in an appropriate coordinate system on the sphere. A given crystal orientation is first represented by a point on the sphere. When the same sphere is regarded as the celestial sphere, it is easy to find the point of light on the sphere that results from the given crystal orientation. The analysis gives crude information on intensities of halos, not just along the caustic curve but for the entire sky.


In this paper, I examine college curriculum competencies and skills acquired in college education that former students report as most essential to improve their career experiences. Multivariate analysis indicates that despite the technological changes occurring in places of work, skills in oral communication, written communication, public speaking, motivating and managing others, and effective group leadership are most essential for career improvement. Other skills former students found essential for career development are skill in finance and cost management, negotiating employees/employer differences, and handling consumer/customer relations. ********** INTRODUCTION Innovation in technology, changes in the business world, globalization, and the increasing diversity of the workforce may be altering the kinds of college competencies and general skills universities and colleges are being called to deliver. Further, college graduates typically find themselves in the center of economic, political, and social realities that define our complex global world. Thus, education at all institutions (universities and community colleges) must address the diverse demands placed on graduates because competencies and skills needed for effective functioning in a global society and in workplaces may be changing. The nature of these changes are such that training in higher institutions must be extended beyond the narrowly focused, job-specific technical training orientation that has typified many programs at many universities. If the educational system is to effectively prepare graduates to fill job requirements in the 21st century, curricula must change to reflect the dynamic needs of modem industries in the information age. The purpose of this paper is to examine college curriculum competencies and skills former students report as most essential to their career development. My assumption is that knowledge about general educational competencies and skills former students found essential to their careers would be useful to college faculty and policy makers who represent accrediting associations for constructing effective curricula. Further, the more that is known about general educational competencies and skills businesses expect their new employees to have, and the more they are taken into account in curriculum development and reform, the more competitive college graduates will be in the labor market of the future. METHOD Data for this analysis are from a study of former students who graduated from Southern Land-Grant Universities. The Research Project (Occupational Career Paths of Former Students in Southern Land-Grant Universities) examined the actual labor market experiences of former students after graduation. Using the Total Design Method (Dillman 1978) a questionnaire was sent to all former students located. The survey focused on former students' background information, educational attainment, career mobility, college curriculum competencies and skills, opinions about agricultural careers and personal characteristics. The questionnaire with an explanatory cover letter and return stamped envelope, were sent to former students from Alabama A & M University, Tennessee State University, University of Tennessee, Tuskegee University, and Auburn University. Out of the 409 former students relocated, 291 from Auburn University and University of Tennessee (the 1862 Land-Grant Universities in the sample) returned complete questionnaires. The current analysis focuses on these 291 former students from the two traditional (1862) white land-grant universities. Measures General college curriculum competencies are skills obtained from a wide variety of courses. Former students were asked to rate 15 action competencies faculty often identify as important aspects of college education with respect to how much the competencies are needed in their occupations and careers. The question asked was: "To improve your own career experiences, how would you rate the extent to which you needed or did not need to acquire the following competencies and skills in your college education? …


Deconvolved and second derivative Fourier transform infrared spectra of the proteins flavodoxin and triosephosphate isomerase have been obtained in the 1600 to 1700 cm-1 (amide I) region. To our knowledge these results provide the first experimental infrared data on proteins with parallel beta-chains. Characteristic absorption bands for the parallel beta-segments are observed at 1626-1639 cm-1 (strong) and close to 1675 cm-1 (weak). Previous theoretical studies based on hypothetical models with large, regular beta-sheets had suggested bands close to 1650 and 1666 cm-1. Our new assignments were confirmed by band area measurements, which yield conformational information in good agreement with results from X-ray diffraction data. The spectra were compared with corresponding spectra of concanavalin A and carboxypeptidase A. The first contains only antiparallel beta-segments, the second "mixed" beta-segments, with some strands lying antiparallel and others parallel. None of the observed amide I band frequencies assigned to parallel beta-chains occurs in the 1650 cm-1 region associated with helical segments.


PEDIATRIC NURSES' DEATH ANXIETY AND LEVEL OF COMFORT IN APPROACHING FAMILIES OF DYING CHILDREN By Elizabeth June Cook The purpose of this study is to examine how demographics; bereavement education; personal death anxiety; and frequency of interaction with death and dying; impact the level of comfort pediatric nurses have in approaching families of dying children. Watson's Theory of Human Caring (n.d.) and the Quality Caring Model (Duffy & Hoskins, 2003) provide the theoretical framework for nursing actions and outcomes. The convenience sample of 165 pediatric nurses comes from a metropolitan children's hospital population of 425 pediatric nurses. Nurses are recruited by a mass e-mail to their work e-mails with a link to the online survey. Nurses' comfort level in approaching families of dying children is positively related to pediatric nursing experience; bereavement and emotionally charged communication education; choosing to interact with families of dying children; and frequency of interactions. Comfort level was not associated with total DAS score.


This paper proposes a new ellipsoid-based guaranteed state estimation approach for linear discrete-time systems with bounded perturbations and bounded measurement noise. This approach is based on the minimization of the radius of the ellipsoidal state estimation set. Firstly, the ellipsoidal state estimation is computed by o -line solving a Linear Matrix Inequality optimization problem. Secondly, a new online method is developed in order to improve the accuracy of the estimation but it leads to an increase of the online computation load. A new scaling technique is proposed to reduce the computation time, while keeping a good accuracy of the state estimation. An illustrative example is analyzed in order to show the advantages of the proposed approach.


This paper is aim at realizing control for systems described by Klein-Gordon-Maxwell (K-G-M) equation. Theoretic approach will be formulated in the framework of variational theory. On the other hand, computational insight using semi-discrete numerical algorithm is consist of finite element method. Lastly, numerical experiments are evident the completely combination of theoretic and computation aspects.


Abstract In this paper we study the effect of the single currency across industries for euro area members. This analysis may help to shed light on the main factors influencing the euro effect on trade flows. We intend to verify whether these factors are specific to individual sectors and/or countries or common to the entire euro area. We use a dynamic specification of an augmented gravity equation. Following the most recent econometric literature, we apply the "System GMM" dynamic panel data estimator of Blundell and Bond to avoid inconsistency and biases in the estimates, and introduce controls for heterogeneity. Aggregate sector results average out country-level behaviours that, on their turn, are affected by different (unobserved) responses of firms, endowed with diverse production costs, to the enhancing and dampening impacts due to the euro. Due to this reason, the cancelling out at aggregate level of heterogenous behaviours induces an aggregation bias. So it is not surprising that when moving from sector to sector/country analysis the picture becomes much more variegated, with the emergence of a whole range of winners and losers among industries in the different nation. Our empirical results are in line with theoretical framework we assumed as reference that considers the possibility of both stimulative and dampening effects coming from trade integration and points out the fact that sector exports impacts are the aggregation results of firm-level heterogenous behaviours.


Racial and ethnic minorities bear a disproportionate burden of the diabetes epidemic; they have higher prevalence rates, worse diabetes control, and higher rates of complications. This article reviews the effectiveness of health care interventions at improving health outcomes and/or reducing diabetes health disparities among racial/ethnic minorities with diabetes. Forty-two studies met inclusion criteria. On average, these health care interventions improved the quality of care for racial/ethnic minorities, improved health outcomes (such as diabetes control and reduced diabetes complications), and possibly reduced health disparities in quality of care. There is evidence supporting the use of interventions that target patients (primarily through culturally tailored programs), providers (especially through one-on-one feedback and education), and health systems (particularly with nurse case managers and nurse clinicians). More research is needed in the areas of racial/ethnic minorities other than African Americans and Latinos, health disparity reductions, long-term diabetes-related outcomes, and the sustainability of health care interventions over time.


This review article describes the various image guided interventional techniques used for treating chronic backache attributed to disc related pathologies. With the aim of minimum invasion and maximum relief, these procedures comprise predominantly of annuloplasty and disc decompression via different mechanisms. Newer therapies are discussed in this review article with the objective of restoring disc height and its biomechanical function by substitution of biochemical constituents, regeneration of cartilaginous end plate and finally artificial disc implantation.


The aim of this study was to assess the dynamic changes in respiratory mechanics during the first stepwise increase of mean airway pressure (MAP) in preterm lambs receiving HFOV. Six 132d preterm lambs were commenced on HFOV at MAP of 14 cmH2O and frequency (fosc) of 10Hz. Five min after birth MAP was increased up to 30 cmH2O in 2-min steps of 4 cmH2O. At the beginning (t0) and at the end (t1) of each step fosc was reduced to measure Xrs at 5Hz. Lung volume (VL) changes were simultaneously measured by electrical impedance tomography. VL monotonically increased during the recruitment manoeuvre (RM). In average only the 22±2% (mean±SD) of the total change occurring at each step immediately followed the change in MAP, while the remaining 78±2% occurred over the next 2 min. Xrs at first decreased, then it increased over time stabilizing to a higher value compared with the lower MAP step. During the first RM of an immature lung, VL recruitment is a very-time dependent phenomenon and when MAP is increased, stabilization to a higher lung volume requires few minutes and is preceded by tissue distension. These data suggest that monitoring lung mechanics during the first RM could maximise the efficacy of the procedure minimising mechanical stress to lung tissues.