Today's Automatic Speech Recognition systems only rely on acoustic signals and often don't perform well under noisy conditions. Performing multi-modal speech recognition - processing acoustic speech signals and lip-reading video simultaneously - significantly enhances the performance of such systems, especially in noisy environments. This work presents the design of such an audio-visual system for Automated Speech Recognition, taking memory and computation requirements into account. First, a Long-Short-Term-Memory neural network for acoustic speech recognition is designed. Second, Convolutional Neural Networks are used to model lip-reading features. These are combined with an LSTM network to model temporal dependencies and perform automatic lip-reading on video. Finally, acoustic-speech and visual lip-reading networks are combined to process acoustic and visual features simultaneously. An attention mechanism ensures performance of the model in noisy environments. This system is evaluated on the TCD-TIMIT 'lipspeaker' dataset for audio-visual phoneme recognition with clean audio and with additive white noise at an SNR of 0dB. It achieves 75.70% and 58.55% phoneme accuracy respectively, over 14 percentage points better than the state-of-the-art for all noise levels.


The Commonwealth of Puerto Rico's New Fiscal Plan's debt sustainability analysis is evaluated in conjunction with existing metrics and frameworks for understanding debt sustainability. This includes the IMF's Debt Sustainability Framework and the rating agencies' methodologies in rating General Obligation bonds. Different peer comparison groups— sovereign nations, U.S. states, and municipalities— and their relevant statistics are considered and discussed. This paper proposes a peer group of municipalities, specifically of the City of Detroit, to establish a sustainable level of debt for Puerto Rico. Ratio metrics are calculated from the City of Detroit's Comprehensive Annual Financial Reports to offer a comparative look at Puerto Rico's debt levels. All metrics demonstrate that Puerto Rico's current debt obligations must be greatly adjusted to result in a successful restructuring and feasible plan moving forward.


Introduction: The prevalence of mental illnesses among industrial workers ranged between 14% - 51%, which is more than that of the general population. Individual's psychosocial functioning has an impact on the work efficiency and hence the current study was undertaken to screen workers in tea plantations. Objective: To document the prevalence of probable mental illness and its associated factors among workers in selected tea estates in South India. Methodology: A cross sectional study was done in two tea estates in Tamil Nadu from March to May 2012.  The General Health Questionnaire (GHQ) 28 was used to screen for mental health status. Socio-demographic details, work profile and associated risk factors were also documented. Results: Among the 400 subjects interviewed, 75.5% were females. The mean age was 43.21 (±7.47) years and the mean work experience was 21.38 (±9.31) years. In this study 12.8% subjects screened positive for probable mental illness and 1%, 1%, 0.2% and 1.5% screened positive for the domains of somatic symptoms, anxiety/insomnia, social dysfunction and severe depression respectively. Workers who screened positive for probable mental illness had availed significantly greater duration of leave in the previous year. There was no significant association of mental illness with age, gender, marital status, substance abuse, designation, co-morbidity and stressful life events. Conclusion: The prevalence of probable mental illness was similar to other occupational settings. Management of the associated risk factors may improve one's work efficiency and productivity.


Cardiomyocyte (CM) proliferative potential varies considerably across species. While lower vertebrates and neonatal mammals retain robust capacities for CM proliferation, adult mammalian CMs lose proliferative potential due to cell-cycle withdrawal and polyploidization, failing to mount a proliferative response to regenerate lost CMs after cardiac injury. The decline of murine CM proliferative potential occurs in the neonatal period when the endocrine system undergoes drastic changes for adaptation to extrauterine life. We recently demonstrated that thyroid hormone (TH) signaling functions as a primary factor driving CM proliferative potential loss in vertebrates. Whether other hormonal pathways govern this process remains largely unexplored. Here we showed that agonists of glucocorticoid receptor (GR) and vitamin D receptor (VDR) suppressed neonatal CM proliferation in vitro. We next examined CM nucleation and proliferation in mutant mice lacking GR or VDR specifically in CMs, but we observed no difference between mutant and control littermates. Additionally, we generated compound mutant mice that lack GR or VDR and express dominant-negative TH receptor alpha in their CMs, and similarly observed no increase in CM proliferative potential compared to dominant-negative TH receptor alpha mice alone. Thus, although GR and VDR activation in cultured CMs is sufficient to inhibit CM proliferation, they seem to be dispensable for CM cell-cycle exit and binucleation in vivo. In addition, given the recent report that VDR activation in zebrafish promotes CM proliferation and tissue regeneration, our results suggest distinct roles of VDR in zebrafish and rodent CM cell-cycle regulation.


Efficient and accurate information retrieval is a goal of just about everyone. Whether you are looking for information on the Internet, a book or article in the library, satellite imagery of missile silos, or a recipe for dinner, finding exactly what you want or need, even if you know exactly what you are looking for, can be an imposing and most difficult task. Many current techniques require an intimate understanding of the actual processes involved. The method presented in this paper provides for an automatic representation of text data by vectors, which can then be manipulated to categorize and organize the data. Information can be retrieved without knowledge of the underlying process. The user can ask for information using normal discourse. This technology can also be applied to data mining and visualization.


Aquarium fish is one of the most common household companion animals for humans. Keeping and appreciating aquarium fish enriches us and provides comfort to our lives. However, difficulty in communicating and understanding their fish may negatively impact the person's motivation to continuously take care of their fish. In order to enhance human-fish interaction, we propose "AffectiveNemo", an ACI system for aquarium fish, that estimates and displays "observed emotion" (defined as fish's emotional states that the system estimates based on observations by humans), via speech bubbles shown on an LCD display placed behind the aquarium. The system estimates the observed emotion by analyzing the movement of the fish in the aquarium, and combining this data along with the emotions that the humans perceive the fish to have. We evaluated the accuracy of each module as a preliminary experiment, conducted a user study on the influence of displaying observed emotion, and evaluated the utility of the system. Our findings concluded that the system can correctly detect the observed emotion, further enhance viewer sensitivity by displaying the observed emotion of aquarium fish that humans are perceptive, and promote the interest in aquarium fish.


Synopsis The Late Devensian arctic marine deposits (Errol Clay Formation) at the Gallowflat Claypit between Perth and Dundee are correlated with the type succession at nearby Inchcoonans, but include an expanded basal glaciomarine unit with rhythms interpreted as symmict varves. Laminated silt–clay couplets are thought to be tidal. Conditions were fully marine by 13.8 ka bp (based on new radiocarbon dates and a 400 a reservoir age). Following recession of the Tay–Forth glacier from its advanced Late Devensian position at the Wee Bankie Terminal Moraine, it is inferred that deglaciation of the middle Tay estuary some 100 km to the west took place between 14.5 and 14 ka bp. The possibility that there was a readvance of ice in the Tay and Forth estuaries during or close to the Heinrich iceberg discharge event H1 is briefly discussed.


Present Status of Gonorrhoea Control. T. GUTHE (Service of Venereal Diseases and Treponematoses, World Health Organization, Geneva, Switzerland) Epidemiological factors and changing ecological conditions have greatly facilitated the national and international spread of gonorrhoea and its worldwide rising incidence. Gonorrhoea is currently 'out of control' and in some areas epidemic. Drug resistance among circulating strains of gonococci is not a major contributing factor; several effective-albeit more costly-antibiotics are in reserve for therapeutic use against strains partially resistant to penicillin. The increasing public health problem presented by gonorrhoea is mainly due to non-medical environmental factors. If medical progress is to neutralize the present upward trend of incidence, immunological research must be accelerated and coordinated in a concentrated effort. Such research should be directed towards (a) Definition of a simple, practical seroimmunological test capable of rapidly diagnosing the disease, notably in asymptomatic infected females who represent the main reservoir of infection (b) Clarification of humoural and cellular immunity processes and the development-if possible-of an agent or a vaccine capable of producing immunoprotection. Recent experiences concerning immunity to the meningococcus provide a background of some interest. EPIDEMIOLOGY Factors which Increase the Spread of Gonorrhoea. L. JUHLIN (Department of Dermatology and Venereology, University Hospital, Uppsala, Sweden) In Sweden the number of cases of gonorrhoea has greatly increased in the last 10 years, and the problem has been aggravated by the changing clinical picture. The symptoms of gonorrhoea were usually easily recognized in the past, but now 20 per cent. of the men as well as 55 per cent. of the women have no symptoms at all. This is the principal reason why complications of gonorrhoea are today more frequent and often very severe. On the other hand, treatment with penicillin is still effective and the few failures of treatment do not alone account for the increased incidence. Investigations among students at Uppsala showed that sexual education and information on venereal diseases were sufficient but there was a general reluctance to undergo medical examination. Moreover the high frequency of multiple sexual intercourse contributed to the spread of the disease. Our efforts to prevent the increase of gonorrhoea, by antibiotic prophylaxis, early case finding, and availability of medical examination, have not been successful. Intensive information on gonorrhoea and its treatment, given by the press, radio, and television, is another possibility that we think would be worth exploring.


LiNi1/3Co1/3Mn1/3O2 and Ce-doped LiNi1/3Co1/3Mn1/3O2 cathode materials were synthesized by a co-precipitation method and solid phase synthesis and characterized using X-ray diffraction (XRD) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The results indicated that the resultant cathode materials with different Ce content all had a good layer structure and high crystallinity. Electrochemical performance testing of the cathode materials showed that the discharge capacity increased with increasing Ce content while the initial reversible capacity attenuation decreased with Ce doping. When the Ce content of the cathode materials is x=0.2, and the current charge and discharge rate is a constant 0.2 C, the discharge capacity maintained 91% of its initial capacity after cycling 50 times.


The Central Black Sea Region has an unique vegetation because different vegetation types occurred. In the present study plant communities (from Mediterranean-type to temperate forests) in the Central Black Sea Region along an elevational gradient was evaluated on Ellenberg's Indicator Values (EIVs). EIVs were calculated for nutrient availability, pH and temperature variables (nutrient availability (N), pH (R) and temperature (T)) with the help of weighted averages. Additionally, the vegetation of the study area was classified by using two way indicator species analyses (TWINSPAN) method and the interactions among plant species and EIVs were also studied by the help of Canonical Correspondence Analysis (CCA). We found some differences between our data and the previous data which were obtained from similar vegetation types with respect to EIV's for nutrient availability, pH and temperature. Pteridium aquilinum, Fragaria vesca and Euphorbia amygdaloides var. amygdaloides may be used as an indicator of nutrient availability. There were significant differences among species regarding EIVs for temperature because the study area includes temperate and Mediterranean-type communities.


This study developed a mode choice model that can be used to describe how transit users select emerging competitive transit options. Specifically, the mode choice model considers the selection of traditional fixed-route transit systems, flexible-route systems in which vehicles are shared but routes are flexible to prevailing demands, and individual transit systems that provide door-to-door and demand-responsive service (e.g., taxis, Uber, or Lyft). A stated preference survey was performed: survey participants were provided a specific scenario and were asked to select the most attractive transit option. Each scenario was presented with the following attributes: walking time required, waiting time (including variability), in-vehicle travel time (including variability), monetary cost, and availability of GPS tracking services. Various statistical modeling frameworks were considered and applied to these survey data to describe the mode choice decision-making process. The results revealed that some individuals always selected the same mode, regardless of the parameters, perhaps because of familiarity or personal preference. However, the models also revealed that monetary cost, expected in-vehicle waiting time, expected waiting time, and walking time were statistically significant predictors of the type of flexible transit option selected.


The elusiveness of poetry can make it one of the most challenging yet captivating units for students to explore. In the universe of possible feedback teachers can offer, which type is most promising for moving our burgeoning middle level poets forward? How can middle school teachers use formative assessment to regularly monitor students' performance in poetry? How can this formative assessment best guide instruction and promote growth in poetry learning? How can teachers of young adolescents use formative assessment data that quantifies analysis and interpretation of poetry without severely restricting poetry instruction?Poetry unit standards and common assessmentIn an attempt to augment creativity, reading, and deep understanding, the three seventh grade English teachers at our school used standards to come up with five essential questions in poetry in order to focus instruction for an eight-week unit in poetry. Each of these questions helps to address the school standards and the Common Core State Standards (RL 7.4, 7.5 7.10), in reading, analyzing, and interpreting poetry (National Governors Association Center for Best Practices, 2010). As customary school practice, all teachers teaching the same subject in a grade were required to use the same standards and curriculum, but each could deliver instruction based on her/his preference. As a result, one of the teachers (first author of the article) decided to use formative assessments to guide her instructional lessons throughout this unit. She used the following guiding questions to do so:1. What is the poem about?2. What is the mood or atmosphere of the poem?3. What poetic devices have been used and what is their effect? Please discuss at least one poetic device.4. What is the message in the poem? What does the poet want us to think about?5. What is your opinion of the poem? Why?The message of the poem was defined as the interpretation of the poem, often linked to theme but encompassing more than that. It involves analyzing or unfolding what the poem is saying about the context of the world and what that would mean to the reader. CCSS. ELA RL. 7.1 requires students to support analysis using textual evidence and CCSS.ELA RL 7.2 requires that students determine and analyze a central theme or idea of a particular piece of literature. The fourth question asks students to delve into the analysis process when reading poetry. It asks them to identify a theme and discuss what the poet is trying to say about the theme in the realworld context. Consistent with exemplary middle level education's emphasis on relevance, students should make real-life connections to enable further building on the analysis process. This question is ultimately strengthened by the specific text support the student uses to prove his/ her rationale of the message and its relevance.Since poetry has a creative element, the English teachers wanted to devote some time for the students to work on writing and evaluating their own poetry. As a result, the unit was broken into two phases. Phase one consisted of skill building, where students read, analyzed, and interpreted poetry and one teacher (the first author of the article) used formative assessment. Phase two consisted of creative writing, where students created and evaluated their own and their peers' poetry. All three teachers planned to end phase one at week six of the unit and give the same summative assessment to evaluate students' understanding and interpretation of the poem "Mother to Son" by Langston Hughes and how clearly they expressed themselves in all five questions. They were given one grade on a 1 to 7 scale, where 7 stood for excellent or A+, 6 for very good or A, 5 for good or B, 4 for satisfactory or C, 3-1 needs improvement/poor or D and below.Beginning the actual unitBased on informal discussions on poetry, students had a variety of opinions on studying poems. Although some were excited and believed they had experience in reading, writing, and interpreting poetry, the majority of the students were either anxious or unenthused about the poetry unit because they thought poetry was either boring or did not apply to their lives. …


A series of 514 patients seen at three clinics in the United States and Spain were evaluated using clinical Judgments of hypernasality, and nasometric assessment of oral-nasal resonance balance. Data from the nasometer were obtained while patients read a passage devoid of nasal consonants. Across all subjects, the Pearson correlation coefficient between the clinical and instrumental measures was 0.78. Prediction analyses revealed that maximum efficiency was obtained using a somewhat different threshold nasalance value for each of the three patient samples. When all 514 subjects were investigated as a single group, a threshold nasalance score of 28 was found to optimize identification of patients with and without clinically significant hypernasality. In that analysis, a sensitivity of 0.87, a specificity of 0.86 and an overall efficiency of 0.87 was obtained. The clinical relevance of these findings is discussed.


BACKGROUND
Abnormal blood flow patterns in fetal circulation detected by Doppler ultrasound may indicate poor fetal prognosis. It is also possible that false positive Doppler ultrasound findings could lead to adverse outcomes from unnecessary interventions, including preterm delivery.

OBJECTIVES
The objective of this review was to assess the effects of Doppler ultrasound used to assess fetal well-being in high-risk pregnancies on obstetric care and fetal outcomes.

SEARCH METHODS
We updated the search of Cochrane Pregnancy and Childbirth's Trials Register on 31 March 2017 and checked reference lists of retrieved studies.

SELECTION CRITERIA
Randomised and quasi-randomised controlled trials of Doppler ultrasound for the investigation of umbilical and fetal vessels waveforms in high-risk pregnancies compared with no Doppler ultrasound. Cluster-randomised trials were eligible for inclusion but none were identified.

DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS
Two review authors independently assessed the studies for inclusion, assessed risk of bias and carried out data extraction. Data entry was checked. We assessed the quality of evidence using the GRADE approach.

MAIN RESULTS
Nineteen trials involving 10,667 women were included. Risk of bias in trials was difficult to assess accurately due to incomplete reporting. None of the evidence relating to our main outcomes was graded as high quality. The quality of evidence was downgraded due to missing information on trial methods, imprecision in risk estimates and heterogeneity. Eighteen of these studies compared the use of Doppler ultrasound of the umbilical artery of the unborn baby with no Doppler or with cardiotocography (CTG). One more recent trial compared Doppler examination of other fetal blood vessels (ductus venosus) with computerised CTG.The use of Doppler ultrasound of the umbilical artery in high-risk pregnancy was associated with fewer perinatal deaths (risk ratio (RR) 0.71, 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.52 to 0.98, 16 studies, 10,225 babies, 1.2% versus 1.7 %, number needed to treat (NNT) = 203; 95% CI 103 to 4352, evidence graded moderate). The results for stillbirths were consistent with the overall rate of perinatal deaths, although there was no clear difference between groups for this outcome (RR 0.65, 95% CI 0.41 to 1.04; 15 studies, 9560 babies, evidence graded low). Where Doppler ultrasound was used, there were fewer inductions of labour (average RR 0.89, 95% CI 0.80 to 0.99, 10 studies, 5633 women, random-effects, evidence graded moderate) and fewer caesarean sections (RR 0.90, 95% CI 0.84 to 0.97, 14 studies, 7918 women, evidence graded moderate). There was no comparative long-term follow-up of babies exposed to Doppler ultrasound in pregnancy in women at increased risk of complications.No difference was found in operative vaginal births (RR 0.95, 95% CI 0.80 to 1.14, four studies, 2813 women), nor in Apgar scores less than seven at five minutes (RR 0.92, 95% CI 0.69 to 1.24, seven studies, 6321 babies, evidence graded low). Data for serious neonatal morbidity were not pooled due to high heterogeneity between the three studies that reported it (1098 babies) (evidence graded very low).The use of Doppler to evaluate early and late changes in ductus venosus in early fetal growth restriction was not associated with significant differences in any perinatal death after randomisation. However, there was an improvement in long-term neurological outcome in the cohort of babies in whom the trigger for delivery was either late changes in ductus venosus or abnormalities seen on computerised CTG.

AUTHORS' CONCLUSIONS
Current evidence suggests that the use of Doppler ultrasound on the umbilical artery in high-risk pregnancies reduces the risk of perinatal deaths and may result in fewer obstetric interventions. The results should be interpreted with caution, as the evidence is not of high quality. Serial monitoring of Doppler changes in ductus venosus may be beneficial, but more studies of high quality with follow-up including neurological development are needed for evidence to be conclusive.


Ascorbate is an important cofactor in the biosynthesis of alpha-amidated endocrine and neural peptides. Peptidylglycine alpha-amidating monooxygenase (PAM) is the enzyme responsible for the generation of mature COOH-terminal alpha-amidated peptides from COOH-terminal glycine-extended peptides, and this enzyme requires ascorbate for full activity in vitro. Also, cultured intermediate pituitary lobe cells contain PAM and require ascorbate for the COOH-terminal alpha-amidation of alpha MSH. Since pituitary cells are not capable of synthesizing ascorbate, the ability of the cells to accumulate the cofactor must play an important role in the biosynthesis of alpha-amidated peptides. The AtT20 corticotropic pituitary tumor cell line also contains PAM and a potential site for COOH-terminal alpha-amidation of the pro-ACTH/endorphin-derived hinge peptide and was, thus, used for the study of cellular ascorbate transport. Radiolabeled L-[1-14C]ascorbate ([1-14C]ascorbate) was incubated with the cells under various conditions, and the accumulation of radioactivity by the cells was followed. Reverse phase HPLC was used to identify the integrity of the labeled ascorbate, both intra- and extracellular, during the course of the experiments. The uptake of [1-14C]ascorbate was saturable (Km = 31.5 microM), sodium and temperature dependent, and stereoselective. The products of ascorbate autooxidation, dehydroascorbate and 2,3-diketogulonic acid, did not inhibit [1-14C]ascorbate uptake. To study the presence of ascorbate in the secretory granules, cells were incubated with [1-14C]ascorbate and then induced to secrete with isoproterenol or 8-bromo-cAMP. A 2- to 6-fold stimulation of ACTH secretion over the basal secretion rate was observed; however, the secretion of intracellular [1-14C]ascorbate did not change significantly with stimulation, suggesting that very little of the cellular ascorbate was contained within secretory granules.


A 70% methanol aerial part extract of Vernonia glabra caused a fall in blood pressure in anaesthetised rats. After the 50 μg dose, systolic, diastolic, and mean blood pressures decreased by 56%, 66%, and 61% respectively below the baseline levels. The adrenaline-like activity of the extract was not antagonised by L(-) propranolol on isolated rabbit heart. The extract caused contraction on the isolated rabbit ileum and was abolished with atropine, suggesting the presence of a compound with acetylcholine-like activity. The extract on isolated guinea pig ileum caused contraction which was dose related.


The flow properties of line-pipe steels control the failure resistance of the pipe, and as such are key in successful pipeline design, and in understanding the factors controlling failures when they occur. As first-principals predictive models are challenged to quantify the flow response in typical line-pipe steels, engineers must rely on empirically developed properties to support numerical analysis for purposes of design and/or integrity management. Stress-based design logically relies on a limiting stress, whereas strain-based design used to address issues like ground movement relies on a limit strain. Post-yield these limits are coupled through the steel's stress-strain curve and strain-hardening response. Because the burst-pressure of pipes has been shown to depend on the steel's collapse stress as well as its strain-hardening exponent, n, engineers will need more that the yield stress, Y, or the tensile stress, T, to adequately characterize a pipeline's resistance to failure.
 This paper presents results for the mechanical properties of line-pipe steels developed up to the ultimate tensile stress, or beyond. These stress-strain curves reflect 1) Grades ranging from vintage A25 through recent X100 production. These results have been analyzed to quantify n, Y, and T. These results have further been trended to relate commonly available metrics like Y/T and n, and provide a rational basis for the choice of properties input to numerical analysis.
 It is apparent from this work that current correlations between n and Y/T diverge from the trend for the lower-strength Grades. Further, these results show that within a Grade the value of n is a strong function of the ratio of the actual yield stress (AYS) normalized by SMYS, with this dependence indicative of differences in the chemistry and processing used to achieve the Grade. The effects of n and its dependence on the ratio AYS/SMYS are illustrated regarding the predicted response of line pipes subject to increasing pressure. These predictions have been validated by comparison with results for about 20 full-scale tests to illustrate the viability of this technology.


To investigate the fall efficiency and its influence factors of the hospitalized geriatric patients with cerebrovascular diseases. The Modified Fall Efficacy Scale (MFES), Morse Fall Risk Assessment Scales (MFS), Berg Balance Scale (BBS) and Tinetti Gait Analysis (TGA) were adopted and the combined ways of questionnaires and observation were utilized to investigate the 113 hospitalized geriatric patients with cerebrovascular diseases. The fall efficiency of the geriatric patients with cerebrovascular diseases were 7.85±2.57 scores. The two projects "walking up and down stairs" and "taking public transport means" have got the lowest scores; The two projects "stretching out the hand to the box or the drawer for taking something" and "sitting up and down to the chair" have got the highest scores. It was found that there were three factors which had significant influences on the fall efficiency, they were myodynamia of the right upper extremity, Berg balance functions and gait. For the sake of helping the geriatric patients with cerebrovascular diseases to establish the self-confidence of preventing the falls, the medical workers need to take further psychological counseling for the patients and befittingly and specifically to improve the fall efficiency of patients so as to effectively prevent the occurring of the fall on the basis of improving the balance ability and gait of patients.


Background Chemokines are responsible for metastatic dissemination of cancers, including lymphomas. CCL3, a monocyte inflammatory protein-1 α, has been shown to be active as an inhibitor of primitive hematopoietic cell proliferation in vitro and in vivo . A dysfunction in this inhibitory process has been postulated to contribute to lymphomagenesis. The aim of this study was to measure the serum level of CCL3 and CCL3 mRNA in lymphoma patients compared with its expression during reactive lymphadenopathy; we also studied their effect on treatment response and survival of lymphoma patients. Materials and methods The study included 53 lymphoma patients and 20 reactive lymphadenopathy patients. The serum level of CCL3 was assessed using the enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay technique, and CCL3 gene expression was measured using real time PCR. Results There was a significant increase in the serum level of CCL3 in lymphoma patients (mean, 72.5±24.3 pg/ml) compared with reactive lymphadenopathy patients (mean, 31.5±12.6 pg/ml). Receiver–operator characteristic curve analysis showed a cutoff value of more than 55 pg/ml. There were positive and negative correlations with the lactate dehydrogenase level and time of follow-up (months), respectively. CCL3 expression was higher in lymphoma patients (90.5%) than in reactive lymphadenopathy patients (35%). Increased serum levels and expression of CCL3 were associated with treatment resistance. As regards survival, increased CCL3 expression was associated with decreased survival rate in lymphoma patients. Conclusion CCL3 serum levels or gene expression could be a valuable prognostic marker and may provide insight into creating a new therapeutic modality.


The annual Congress of the Spanish Association of Cuniculture (ASESCU) was held in Segovia (Castilla y Leon) on 27-28th May of 2010. The 35th edition was devoted to analyse the actual situation of the rabbit sector. It was presented an overview of challenges for the future of the Spanish rabbit farms, a review of the competitive factors that affect the rabbit production, and the management systems to ensure food safety in rabbit farms. Moreover, the Technology Platform for Sustainable Agriculture, and a summary of the actions for the promotion of the rabbit meat consumption carried out by the Spanish Rabbit Interprofessional (INTERCUN) were presented in two different conferences. Furthermore, a total of 20 communications were presented in five working sessions. Pathology session analysed a vaccine candidate against RHD, blood lymphocyte populations in multiparous does, the efficacy of Timilcosin, and serological test of blood samples collected in filter paper. Reproduction session studied a new method for artificial insemination, the effect of sperm DNA fragmentation on fecundation ratio, and the effect of development on seminal parameters in bucks. Management and Welfare session included references about the need to carrying technical-economic management in the farms and the link between cage height and welfare. Nutrition session analysed feeding costs, the effect of birth weight and rearing diet on the reproduction of does, the effect of feeding restriction on the productive and pathological parameters of fattening rabbits, the use of barley and lucerne hay on performance of growing rabbits, the effect of dietary short-chain organic acids on performance of growing rabbits, and the influence of a liquid alimentary supplement on fattening rabbits. Morphophysiology and Body Composition session studied intestinal barrier mechanisms and bone content of wild rabbit carcass.


The metabolites of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), such as hydroxylated PCBs (OH-PCBs), have been identified as environmental contaminants. Various studies have shown that some OH-PCBs can potentially contribute to health problems. Detection of these compounds in environmental and biological samples could provide useful information about their levels and lead to a better understanding of their apparent toxicity. To that end, we have developed a whole-cell sensing system for the detection of OH-PCBs by taking advantage of the recognition of a group of related compounds, i.e., hydroxylated biphenyls, by the product of the hbpR gene in the hbp operon from Pseudomonas azelaica strain HBP1. By fusing the luxAB genes, encoding the reporter protein bacterial luciferase, to the hbp regulator-promoter sequence, a whole-cell sensing system was developed. Here, we describe the optimization and application of this whole-cell sensing system for the detection of a model compound, 2-hydroxy-3',4'-dichlorobiphenyl. A detection limit of 1 x 10(-8) M was achieved using this system. The detection of a broad range of individual OH-PCBs as well as an OH-PCB mixture was investigated. The system can detect OH-PCBs in whole serum samples in a trace amount, which is comparable to the detection of these analytes in medium alone. We envision that the method developed can potentially be employed as a rapid and sensitive way to monitor OH-PCBs for toxicological study in the laboratory, as well as a useful tool to evaluate the presence of bioavailable OH-PCBs in natural environments.


From the Publisher:
While covering the basics of wideband CDMA, this major revision of the best-selling Wideband CDMA for Third Generation Mobile Communications brings you up-to-date with all the latest developments in third generation mobile communications. New sections cover fundamental IP concepts, All-IP core networks, and the standardized radio access technologies WCDMA, EDGE and cdma2000, including their future developments WCDMA HSPA and 1XEV.

This cutting-edge book gives you a complete understanding of the complex standardization environment of 3G networks and the design and development of 3G systems to help you achieve higher transfer speeds for video, mobile Internet and other applications. It describes how third generation system applications impact radio access system design and compares and contrasts major wideband CDMA standards: WCDMA, WCDMA TDD and cdma2000. Includes 190 illustrations and 75 equations that support major topics throughout the book.


There has been a great deal of interest in the development of methodologies to map quantitative trait loci (QTL) using experimental crosses in the last 2 decades. Experimental crosses in animal and plant sciences provide important data sources for mapping QTL through linkage analysis. The Collaborative Cross (CC) is a renewable mouse resource that is generated from eight genetically diverse founder strains to mimic the genetic diversity in humans. The recombinant inbred intercrosses (RIX) generated from CC recombinant inbred (RI) lines share similar genetic structures of F2 individuals but with up to eight alleles segregating at any one locus. In contrast to F2 mice, genotypes of RIX can be inferred from the genotypes of their RI parents and can be produced repeatedly. Also, RIX mice typically do not share the same degree of relatedness. This unbalanced genetic relatedness requires careful statistical modeling to avoid false-positive findings. Many quantitative traits are inherently complex with genetic effects varying with other covariates, such as age. For such complex traits, if phenotype data can be collected over a wide range of ages across study subjects, their dynamic genetic patterns can be investigated. Parametric functions, such as sigmoidal or logistic functions, have been used for such purpose. In this article, we propose a flexible nonparametric time-varying coefficient QTL mapping method for RIX data. Our method allows the QTL effects to evolve with time and naturally extends classical parametric QTL mapping methods. We model the varying genetic effects nonparametrically with the B-spline bases. Our model investigates gene-by-time interactions for RIX data in a very flexible nonparametric fashion. Simulation results indicate that the varying coefficient QTL mapping has higher power and mapping precision compared to parametric models when the assumption of constant genetic effects fails. We also apply a modified permutation procedure to control overall significance level.


Water-induced degradation of lead zinc niobate–lead zirconate titanate (Pb(Zn1/3Nb2/3)O3–Pb(ZrTi)O3) soft piezoelectric ceramics is studied using electrochemical hydrogen charging, in which the silver electrodes of the piezoelectric ceramics constitute a cathode in 0.01-M NaOH solution to evolve hydrogen by electrolysis of water. It is found that with the increasing hydrogen charging time, the resonance impedance increases, the difference between the resonance frequency and the anti-resonance frequency decreases, the spontaneous polarization, the remanent polarization and the piezoelectric coefficient d33 decrease. The degradation behaviour of the soft piezoelectric ceramics can be explained to hydrogen incorporating into the lattice and forming hydroxy (OH−) bonds in the perovskite structure, which prevents the Ti ions from switching and increases the coercive field Ec. The degradation characteristics of the soft piezoelectric ceramics are quite different from that of lead zirconate titanate hard piezoelectric ceramics.


Vascular remodeling, i.e., the growth and/or enlargement of both blood and lymphatic vessels, is tightly associated with inflammatory diseases, such as chronic airway inflammation, rheumatoid arthritis, inflammatory bowl disease, and chronic inflammatory skin psoriasis. The lymphatic system collects extravasated fluid, macromolecules, and immune cells from tissues and returns them to the blood circulation. While VEGFR2 and its ligand VEGF-A functions as master regulators of vasculogenesis and angiogenesis, VEGFR3 is critical for lymphangiogenesis. These conclusions are based on observations in genetically modified mice for VEGFR3 and its ligands. VEGFR3 is expressed on the blood and lymphatic endothelium during development, and is restricted to the lymphatics in the adult. Extensive studies have thus far focused on the role of VEGFR3 in lymphangiogenesis during development, however the function, regulation and intracellular mediators of the VEGFR3-dependent pathways in pathologic formation of lymphatic vessels during diseases remain poorly characterized. Our recent studies have identified two critical intracellular mediators, AIP1 and Bmx, in regulating VEGFR3 expression and activity. Genetic deletion of AIP1, a Ras-GAP protein, delays developmental lymphangiogenesis in neonatal skin and mesentery, and mounts weaker VEGF-C-induced cornea lymphangiogenesis. Deletion of Bmx, a non-receptor tyrosine kinase, has no effect on developmental lymphangiogenesis but blunts pathological lymphangiogenesis in mouse models. Mechanistically, AIP1 and Bmx sequentially regulate different steps during the VEGFR3 activation. AIP1 constitutively binds to VEGFR3 and enhances VEGFR3 endocytosis and stability. Bmx is not expressed in developmental lymphatics but is induced in response to pathological stimuli such as ischemia, and associates with an active form of VEGFR3 to regulate its downstream signaling without an effect on receptor phosphorylation. I will report the most recent progress as to how AIP1 and Bmx coordinately regulate VEGFR3-dependent lymphangiogenesis.


There is increasing demand for reports on the results and poverty impacts of private sector development projects. This article suggests that projects can respond to this demand through internal monitoring systems that provide both useful information for project management and estimated impacts on enterprises and poverty reduction. The article discusses the case of Katalyst, an M4P project in Bangladesh that has installed an internal monitoring system that uses a mid-range approach to impact assessment. Katalyst's impact assessment in the pond fish sector is presented, giving the details of what was measured, how it was measured, the conclusions drawn and follow up decisions made. Katalyst's overall impact monitoring system is then presented with an emphasis on how Katalyst balances accuracy with simplicity. The article concludes with Katalyst's perspective on how this system has been useful both for internal management and external reporting.


As there is increasing emphasis on transformative education and authentic learning in interdisciplinary research projects, it is meaningful to investigate how to effectively design a multidisciplinary research and education program to ensure beneficial outcomes for participating students. This is especially important for ocean and coastal engineering programs that are likely the most multidisciplinary engineering programs. The NSF PIRE Coastal Flood Risk Reduction Program is an international place and problem-based research education program in which students conduct case studies across the Houston-Galveston metropolitan area in the U.S. and in the Netherlands. There are three to four designated case studies (place-based) annually in each country, covering both surge-based and precipitation-driven flood problems (problem-based). From 2016 to 2018, there were three student research trips to the Netherlands (one each year, after the spring semesters). A total of 42 U.S. students, graduate and undergraduate were selected from four participating U.S. campuses apply for a designated Dutch case study. The three to four case studies change every year. Students from diverse disciplines, including engineering, planning, economics, hydrology, biology, architecture, geography, communications, and computational hydraulics, interested in flood risk reduction can apply. Those accepted into the Program are placed in interdisciplinary research teams composed of 5-6 students: 1-2 PhD, 2-3 Masters, and 2-3 undergraduate students. The teams are guided by project faculty mentors from both U.S. and Dutch partner institutions. A two-week long research trip to the Netherlands provides transformative education and an authentic learning environment through field trips, meetings with Dutch flood experts, lectures, and participation in design workshops. Students are required to present their research work three times while they are in the Netherlands: 5-minute research plan; 10-minute research progress; and 15-minute final presentation. By preparing these presentations, students learn how to collect data, interview stakeholders, lead/participate in brain-storming discussions, and adjust/improve their research products. Students also learn how to interact with people from different disciplines and look at the issues from diverse perspectives. This article describes the design process of the Program, from initial development through implementation. Reflections and lessons learned from the first three years of the Program are shared.


Two field trials were carried out to evaluate the effects of burn-down timing of Urochloa ruziziensis on transgenic soybean establishment and yield under the no-tillage system. One experiment was conducted in Colina, SP - Brazil, in 2007/2008 season, and the other in Jaboticabal, SP - Brazil, 2009/2010 season. In 2007/2008, the experiment was carried out in a 7-year-old grass pasture of U. ruziziensis, with four burn-down timings of vegetation cover being tested 30, 20, 10, and 0 days in advance to soybean sowing. In 2009/2010, the experiment was conducted in an old grass pasture of U. ruziziensis cropped with maize the summer before. After maize harvesting, a natural re-infestation of U. ruziziensis occurred, corresponding to more than 80% of the vegetation cover. In this experiment, treatments corresponded to six burn-down timings of vegetation cover 25, 20, 16, 7, and 0 days in advance to soybean sowing. In all experiments, 1.44 kg a.e. ha-1 of herbicide glyphosate was applied, and the soybean cultivar M-SOY 7908 RR was used. The experiments were arranged in a randomized block design, with four replicates. The evaluations were carried out by measuring crop stand 20 days after sowing and pre-harvest, plant height, first pod insertion height, number of pods per plant, grain yield, and estimated yield. Data were submitted to ANOVA and the Tukey test at 5% of probability. Burn-down of U. ruziziensis performed at the same day of crop sowing reduced plant height, number of pods per plant, and crop grain yield. Burn-down timing of U. ruziziensis using glyphosate was recommended to be between 10 and 20 days in advance to crop sowing. In conclusion, soybean yield was affected by burn-down timing of U. ruziziensis.


The Ecospace model for spatial organization of trophic interactions has seen limited use for evaluation of policies such as marine protected areas, partly because of concern about representing key indicator populations only by spatial biomass distributions. The software has been improved to include spatial representation of age structure for such species, by means of the Ecosim "multistanza" population submodel, which assumes similar diet compositions, predation risk, and vulnerability to fishing over blocks or stanzas of fish ages. A computationally efficient version of Ecospace now preserves the multistanza age structure over spatial habitat and ecosystem biomass maps, evaluating body growth and mortality rates as spatial averages weighted by relative biomass use of each model spatial cell. A more computationally intense version divides each multistanza population into spatial packets (an individual-based model approach) for more precise analysis of how movement patterns and movement histories over mosaics of trophic opportunities and risks affect population performance and variability. The two approaches give surprisingly similar predictions of abundance patterns over both time and space, agreeing well in case-study applications to the Gulf of Mexico and California coast with each other and with nonspatial Ecosim predictions.


This study focuses on the formulation of a spectral approach to obtain the transmission coefficient (Ct ) of floating breakwaters (FB) in irregular waves based on Ct in regular waves. Additionally, it provides a performance comparison of two quite similar rectangular and circular pontoons as FB. It starts with the comparison of Ct and extends to motions in regular waves by experiment. Overall, the rectangular section showed better performance for both Ct and motions. The spectral approach is formulated and validated. A parametric study on the performance of rectangular and circular FBs has been conducted by applying large scale physical modelling. The study shows that the rectangular section has considerably better performance than the circular section in almost all irregular waves. It is concluded that the spectral approach for irregular waves is a comprehensive method. It is also easy for implementation having FB performances in a limited number of regular waves.


In this paper convergence results with respect to Hölder-Zygmund norms including also maximum norm error estimates are derived for the fully discrete trigonometric collocation method presented earlier by Saranen and Vainikko for solution of boundary integral equations on smooth closed curves. Approximation of the integral operator is based on product integration for which the explicit Fourier representation of the main part is not needed, and still the convergence of arbitrarily high rate for smooth solutions can be achieved. Saranen and Vainikko have given their analysis with respect to Sobolev norms yielding results that do not imply pointwise error estimates of optimal order. In this work the approach is based on the use of Hölder-Zygmund norms, and the optimal order maximum norm estimates are accomplished.


Objective To examine neural correlates of intellectual activity underlying multiple pathways imparting reserve by testing that higher intellectual activity is associated with lower brain amyloid pathology, greater gray matter (GM) volume, and differential task-evoked brain activation levels as a function of amyloid positivity status among clinically intact older adults. Methods Eighty-two cognitively normal older adults and 46 healthy young participants underwent fMRI during task switching. All older participants completed 18F-florbetaben-PET and an individual's amyloid positivity status was determined. To assess GM volume, T1-weighted high-resolution structural images were processed using voxel-based morphometry. As lifestyle factors, intellectual activity was estimated by a composite score of vocabulary, reading ability, and years of education. Results Across all older participants, intellectual activity was associated with lower amyloid deposition in lateral and medial frontoparietal and temporal lobes but higher amyloid deposition in superior frontal and parietal cortices, larger GM volume across widespread brain regions, and reduced brain activation during task switching. These patterns of associations, however, differed by amyloid positivity status. While the patterns of associations remained similar among amyloid-negative older adults, among amyloid-positive older adults, intellectual activity was associated with increased amyloid deposition in frontoparietal cortices and increased activation during task. Conclusions Intellectual activity simultaneously exerts both neuroprotective and compensatory effects via multiple neural pathways that promote optimal brain aging and help maintain normal cognition during amyloid accumulation.


In this chapter, an algorithm for the solution of the mathematical model featuring steady-state multicomponent distillation columns is analyzed and applied in the case study of the separation of hydrocarbon mixture. The development of the model has assumed each stage outlet streams in thermodynamic equilibrium in the phases liquid and vapor. The modeling of liquid was considerate and the non-ideality behavior was described by activity. The non-ideality of gas phase was calculated by Peng-Robinson equation of state. The model consists of a set of nonlinear algebraic equations. The algorithm and numerical procedure to solve a set of equations are presented in a sequential, general and very simple form. A methodology to produce the good initial guess was defined based on rude simplifications of the system. In the study case, the initial estimates generated by the method are very good, being only about 20% far from the simulation results and considering a tolerance of 10, the convergence was obtained with 28 iterations.


This paper is finishing part of the two-year master programme in Industrial Engineering and Management.Initially there was an inquiry of studying the queue-times that Flakt Woods uses when they break down internal working orders. These times were assumed to be too generalised and does not apply to the actual value of the queue-times which generates incorrect data and delivery delays. During the work of this paper it has been established that it is not the queue-times that is the biggest problem. The problem is the shop floor control and the lack of manufacturing the right products at the right time. Therefore an analysis of the production planning process was made to bring forward the real problems. The purpose of this paper is to work out a decision basis how Flakt Woods should plan their production in order to increase the internal and external delivery precision.The result of the analysed times and delivery precisions shows that the actual queue-times in many cases exceeds the planned queue-time. The actual delivery precision is below the target value in all the cases. The identified problems are in the first place that it is too much focus on the next few hours and that there is a sub optimization for the different production groups.A new planning system is suggested where focus is on the coming time periods and what is manufactured in a production group is based on the actual need. This is done by using individual dispatch lists for the different production groups. The dispatch lists is based on the actual need in the following group and there should be a capacity limit in order to reduce the risk of overbooking the production. In the end this system will provide a manufacturing order based on the actual need in the final assembly groups. The work of the production planner will focus on planning the coming production for the final assembly groups. In the future the system might be transferred to the suppliers in order to get the right products at the right time.


The world is increasingly concerned with bridging the developmental gap between the developed and developing countries. With the establishment of a number of institutions for funding the projects including the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, and many other agencies, the need to develop mechanisms to assess economically viable projects is more important than ever. The Social-Cost Benefit Analysis (SCBA) is an important technique used in formulating, appraising, and evaluating projects. It is a facet of applied welfare economics which is increasingly being used to identify and assess public projects in both developing and developed countries. This volume presents a comprehensive view of cost-benefit analysis in its theoretical and applied dimensions. Both theory and case studies are presented. The theoretical setting for Cost-Benefit Analysis is established by the first five chapters-"Spatial General Equilibrium and Cost-Benefit Analysis," by David M. Newbery; "Optimum Growth Theory and Social Time Preference: A Computerized Mathematical Modeling Exercise to Choose a Social Discount Rate," by Sardar M. N. Islam; "A Theoretical Inquiry of the Axiomatic Consistency of Distributional Weights used in Cost-Benefit Analysis," by Giuseppe Munda; "The Output Gap: Measurement, Related Concepts, and Policy Implications," by Parameswar Nandakumar; and "A Methodological Comparison of Theoretical Approaches in Dichotomous Choice Contingent Valuation," by John C. Whitehead. This book will be useful as a reference text by professors and students in project appraisal classes and will be of equal value to analysts, planners, and interested general readers.


Representative survey results have shown a stable approval rate for implementing unconditional basic income of between 45 and 52 percent in Germany since 2016/17. In European comparison, this approval rate is low. Younger, better educated persons, and those at risk of poverty support the concept of unconditional basic income in Germany. But these demographics are not the only factors that correlate with attitudes toward unconditional basic income: subjective justice attitudes do as well. The justice norm of equity and unconditional basic income appear to be contradictory. On the other hand, people who find that there are deficits in covering the needs of society's lower income groups tend to approve of unconditional basic income. Therefore, analyses show that attitudes toward unconditional basic income follow specific patterns and social regularities; and they were relatively stable between 2016 and 2018. As long as uncertainty predominates regarding the social costs and benefits of implementing such a basic income, the relatively high proportion of those in favor must be interpreted with care. It does not indicate that society is actually ready for reforms in this direction.


This annual ASME committee report covers selected worldwide developments in passenger rail vehicles components and systems. The information contained herein was obtained from responses to survey letters sent to the manufacturers of passenger rail vehicles and components, and from a review of trade and technical publications.


This paper describes the adaptation and generalization of a rating scheme for judging the quality of collaboration during network-based problem solving activities with Synergo, a network-based synchronous collaborative drawing environment including a shared whiteboard and a chat tool. The goal of this study was to develop a tool for assessing the strength and weaknesses in students' collaboration in large samples. A second goal was to show that the rating scheme's dimensions can capture the main aspects of effective collaboration across diverse settings. Adaptation of the rating scheme involved adjusting the dimensions' definitions to the affordances of the Synergo tool and characteristics of the given algorithm task, and testing it in a sample of six dyads selected from a broad range of studies. The final, adapted rating scheme includes seven dimensions: (i) collaboration flow, (ii) sustaining mutual understanding, (iii) exchanging knowledge and giving explanations, (iv) argumentation, (v) structuring the problem solving process and time management, (vi) cooperative orientation, and (vii) individual task orientation. For each dimension, we provide a detailed definition and case studies that illustrate how the rating scheme's dimensions can be used to describe and evaluate differentially the quality of students' collaboration. We outline perspectives for future research applying the newly developed rating scheme.


This thesis describes computer-assisted (CA) methods for the treatment of acquired language impairment in adult aphasics. A key design objective of this project was the elimination of the indirect manipulation of keyboard and mouse (in CA speech language therapy sessions) in favour of the direct manipulation of virtual and physical objects afforded by touchscreen display and radio frequency identification technology (RFID). While computer-assisted treatment of aphasia has been used since the 1960s, the efficacy and effectiveness of such treatment is inconclusive. Contradictory results exist in textbooks and research studies. This work seeks to add to the debate with the development of methods that may or may not offer greater stimulus to patient-users and which may, or may not, result in improved rehabilitation of language impairment. The text begins with an overview of aphasia and aphasiology, and speech language therapy. Theory and practice as described in readings both within the aformentioned subjects and in the areas of human-computer interaction and accessible computing, and informal interviews with an expert in the field of aphasia are discussed in the following section on system design. Guidelines for design requirements are drawn therefrom. Where a specific consideration led to a requirement it is set forth in the relevant section. Functional description of hardware and software elements of the system follow, and are in turn followed by a description of prototype evaluation, and perceived limitations of the system. Future development (Phase II) of the system may include back-end services for direct and Web data acquisition with a view to clinical-outcome research.


PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine effects of entrepreneurial leadership (EL) and organizational innovation (OI) on business performance (BP) of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) as well as to determine whether environmental dynamism (ED) moderates the mediating effect of OI in the EL‒BP relationship.Design/methodology/approachThe study was carried out on the basis of questionnaire survey among 243 SME owners of Pokhara valley of Nepal. Hierarchical multiple regression and other different PROCESS models were considered to examine direct, mediation, moderation and moderated mediation relationships.FindingsThe findings suggest a significant positive effect of EL on OI and BP and significant mediating role of OI in EL‒BP relationship. But contrary to the prediction, the results indicate that the moderation and moderated mediation relationship are weaker under a dynamic environment than a stable environment.Research limitations/implicationsAs research reveals, ED moderates the studied model differently, and it raises questions on applicability of western theories, scales and their relationship in the South Asian context. Besides this, it has few limitations, which also present opportunities for future research.Practical implicationsThe findings of this research will be significant to entrepreneurs, educators and policymakers for better understanding about study variables, to use as consulting options as well as to prepare effective policies for entrepreneurship development.Originality/valueThis study is perhaps the first study that examines the complex moderated mediation model in the context of minimal work on EL‒BP relationship and facilitates more sophisticated understanding about their relationships as well as shows variables' and model's generalizability in the eastern context.


The photolysis-induced changes in the protein fluorescence intensity (at 320 nm) during the proton-pumping cycle of bacteriorhodopsin were examined by a delayed two-pulse technique in the time range 1 microsecond-20 msec at room temperature. No detectable change in the protein fluorescence intensity was observed on the earliest time scale within the lifetime of the intermediate K590, when retinal apparently undergoes the largest structural changes. The time dependence of the relative changes in fluorescence intensity did, however, display a close correlation with the population of the L550 and M412 intermediates. From a computer numerical fit of the data, with available published kinetic parameters, the protein fluorescence quantum yields of the K590, L550, and M412 intermediates are found to be 1.0, 0.92, and 0.80 of that for native bR570, respectively. The probable mechanisms of the observed fluorescence quenching during the photochemical cycle are qualitatively discussed.


In this paper, the form of perforated brick holes under different thermal conductivity were measured. To meet the strength required in the circumstances, as a scientific experiment to find an appropriate form of holes, porosity in order to meet the current rate of energy saving requirements. Experimental results show that the number of holes, size, shape, all affect the size of the thermal conductivity. Finally, several experiments are compared to find a suitable type.


The present paper describes the methodology and results of assessment of seasonal progress of rice stubble burning for 10 major rice growing districts of Haryana state in India. These 10 districts contribute about 84 per cent of total rice area of the state. As the rice fields are immediately required to be vacated for the sowing of next crop the farmers opt for mechanized harvesting and easy way out of burning the stubbles in the field. Such burning result in release of polluting gases and aerosols. Besides, the heating of the soil kills the useful micro-flora of the soil causing soil degradation. Multi-date AWiFS data from Resourcesat 1 and 2 satellites acquired between October 16, 2013 to November 26, 2013 were used for estimating paddy stubble burning areas at different intervals for the year 2013 crop growing season. In season collected ground truth data using hand held GPS along with field photographs were used to identify paddy stubble burning areas and other land features. Complete enumeration approach and Iterative Self-organizing Data Analysis Technique (ISODATA) unsupervised classifier was used for digital analysis. Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) of each date was also used with other spectral bands of temporal images. To improve the classification accuracy the non-agricultural areas were masked out. The area was estimated by computing pixels under the classified image mask. Progress of paddy stubble burning was estimated at different intervals for the year 2013 using available cloud free multi-date IRS-P6 AWiFS data to identify the crucial period when stubbles burning takes place in major area so that preventive measures can be taken to curb the menace.


The container transportation problem involves designing routing plans for a fleet of vehicles to accommodate requests from multiple ports. A request is a transshipment activity that involves loading a commodity at the source port and then unloading it at the destination port. This problem is closely related to the classic vehicle routing problem (VRP). This thesis investigates a real-world, multi-shift container transportation problem with a limited fleet size. In this problem, requests are sent from the customs office via declaration forms. Each declaration form contains several container transport tasks that share the same time window, source port and destination port. The time windows for container transportation in this problem can generally span across several shifts, thus container transportations can be arranged at any shift. Delaying some transportations to later shifts may cause the violation of time window constraints. As a result, strategies that prioritise tasks with closer deadline need to be developed to ensure that all tasks can be completed.
This thesis presents the following research efforts towards the container transshipment problem. Firstly, two formulations have been proposed to describe the problem, in which the representation of transshipment requests are simplified as nodes. The network of the ports is then discussed and, based on the network, three sets of problem instances are introduced. This thesis then introduces several insertion-based heuristics, which are able to generate solutions that complete all container transshipment tasks. In order to further reduce the travelling distance in the solutions, two multi-neighbourhood algorithms are implemented and experimental results are presented. The characteristics of solutions are discussed to get a deeper understanding of the problem characteristics. The dynamic version of the problem, in which declaration forms arrive over time, is then studied. A discrete event simulation framework is developed to accommodate the experiment of various commodity holding strategies. This research leads to an intelligent container transportation system that automates the task assignment.


Despite advances during the last few decades in the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of community-acquired pneumonia (CAP), its incidence remains high. In this thesis, strategies are described for improvement of the quality of clinical management in patients with pneumonia and for the reduction of the healthcare burden. The focus is on the prevention of pneumonia, a better understanding of the immune response in CAP, further development of biomarkers, and adjunctive therapies.

Recent studies have suggested that gastric acid-suppressive medication may increase the risk of CAP. In Chapter 2, a population-based case-control study is presented on the relationship between proton pump inhibitor (PPI) treatment and CAP. In Chapter 3, the cytokine response in a cohort of 201 non-immunocompromised patients with CAP is described. In addition to the inflammatory response as discussed in Chapter 3, the complement system is an important component of the innate immune system. In Chapter 4, the role of polymorphisms in the genes of these two lectins in patients with S. aureus peritonitis on continuous ambulatory peritoneal dialysis (CAPD) is studied. This led to the study described in Chapter 5 in which binding to the pneumococci of MBL, ficolin-2 and subsequently MASP-2 was explored. This study showed that pneumococci can bind MASP-2 and that ficolin-2 seems to be the overriding MASP-2 activator.In Chapter 6, a quantitative multiplex immunoassay for the measurement of serotype-specific antibody concentrations after the onset of CAP is described. The estimated contribution of the pneumococcus in patients with an unidentified causative agent of CAP was calculated to be 57%. In Chapter 7, the usefulness of serum angiotensin I-converting enzyme (ACE) activity at the time of hospital admission as a prognostic marker is assessed. Serum ACE activity can become useful for the identification of bacteremia before the outcome of blood cultures is known. In Chapter 8, the incidence and predictive value of proteinuria as a biomarker for outcome in patients with CAP is presented. Proteinuria on admission was independently associated with increased length of hospital stay in CAP patients.In Chapter 9, the current literature concerning the various options for supportive therapy of patients treated with otherwise effective antibiotics is reviewed. In Chapter 10, a randomised placebo-controlled trial (RCT) using corticosteroids as an adjunctive treatment to antibiotics in patients with CAP is described. The median length of stay was 6.5 days for patients in the dexamethasone group and 7.5 days in the placebo group (p= 0.048).To further elucidate which patients benefit most from corticosteroids, the cytokine response of 304 patients in an RCT was evaluated in Chapter 11. The overall decrease in cytokine levels was more rapid in patients with CAP treated with dexamethasone in addition to antibiotic treatment than in patients without dexamethasone. In Chapter 12, it is shown that in patients with CAP, a cortisol level <10 µg/dL was not found to be associated with poor outcomes. Furthermore, patients with high cytokine responses and unexpectedly low cortisol levels (<50% of the patients with high cytokine responses) were shown to benefit more from dexamethasone therapy.


The surgical techniques and postoperative management of corneal grafting with an artificial endothelium have been improved. The best technique to date employs a graft of mushroom shape with a silicone membrane attached to the posterior surface of the stem. Since it is possible to use nonviable donor tissue for this procedure, the donor cornea can be lathed in the frozen state to its mushroom shape. The silicone membrane can be sutured to the graft in the laboratory and the whole specimen can be conveniently stored in glycerin at room temperature. The use of a concentrated tissue culture solution in the form of eye drops postoperatively has decreased the complications of this procedure considerably.


Social phobia is characterized by a fear of negative evaluation within social or performance situations, where individuals believe that they are under scrutiny and may be embarrassed (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). The present study was carried out to examine the effectiveness of mindfulness and acceptance-based group therapy on decreasing fears of scrutiny by others in patients with social anxiety among female students. In the first stage, social phobia inventrory (SPIN) (Conor et al, 2000) was administrated to 402 female student of Shahed University. In the second stage 23 socially anxious student screened by SPIN and (Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV) (SCID-I) (First et al,1996) were randomly assigned to experimental group (12 subjects) and control group (11subjects). Then mindfulness and acceptance-based group therapy administered to the experimental group, while control group didn`t attend in any treatment session. All participants completed measure of social phobia scale (Mattick and Clarke, 1989) at pre-treatment and post-treatment. The result of Mann Whitney test revealed significant reduction in fear of scrutiny by others (Z=-3.45, P <0.0001) in experimental group than control group. In sum, mindfulness and acceptance-based group therapy can improve fear of scrutiny by others among a sample of Iranian female students. Therefore a ground has been provided to apply this approach preliminary in psychological centers on patients with social anxiety disorder.


In emerging cognitive radio (CR) networks with spectrum sharing, the first cognitive task preceding any dynamic spectrum access is the sensing and identification of spectral holes in wireless environments. This paper develops a distributed compressed spectrum sensing approach for (ultra-)wideband CR networks. Compressed sensing is performed at local CRs to scan the very wide spectrum at practical signal-acquisition complexity. Meanwhile, spectral estimates from multiple local CR detectors are fused to collect spatial diversity gain, which improves the sensing quality especially under fading channels. New distributed consensus algorithms are developed for collaborative sensing and fusion. Using only one-hop local communications, these distributed algorithms converge fast to the globally optimal solutions even for multi-hop CR networks, at low communication and computation load scalable to the network size.


To date, the provision of ecosystem services has largely been estimated based on spatial patterns of land cover alone, using benefit transfer analysis. Although it is increasingly being recognised that the distribution of the human population affects whether a potential service translates into a realised service, this misses key steps in the process and assumes that everyone accesses ecosystem services in the same way. Here we describe a conceptual approach to ecosystem services in terms of movement and flows. We highlight that ecosystem service flows can be broken down into 'nature to people' (the movement of nature towards beneficiaries) and 'people to nature' (the movement of beneficiaries towards nature). The former has been relatively well described. Here, we explore the latter by reviewing research on human migration, animal foraging and landscape connectivity. We assess if and how existing theories might be useful in describing how people seek out ecosystem services. We consider some of the ways in which flows of people to nature can be measured. Such measurements may reveal which movement theories best represent how people seek out and access ecosystem services. Overall, our review aims to improve the future modelling of ecosystem services by more explicitly considering how people access potential services and therefore realise them.


Objective: To examine how the physical environment, along with other factors such as culture and social support, impact (a) the health and safety of the care team, (b) effectiveness of the healthcare team in providing care and preventing medical errors, and (c) patient and practitioner satisfaction with the experience of giving and receiving care. Methods: Literature review of peer-reviewed journal articles and research reports published in medicine, nursing, psychology, ergonomics, and architecture periodicals and books. Different combinations of keywords were used to search for articles including workforce, nurses, healthcare team, work environments, ergonomics, staff health, staff safety, medical errors, transfers, and communication. Key findings: There is an urgent need to address the inherent problems in the healthcare workplace that lead to staff injuries and hospital-acquired infections, medical errors, operational failures, and wastage. The physical environment plays an important role in improving the health and safety for staff, increasing effectiveness in providing care, reducing errors, and increasing job satisfaction. These improved outcomes may, in turn, help in reducing staff turnover and increase retention — two key factors related to providing quality care in hospitals. However, it has become increasingly clear that efforts to improve the physical environment alone are not likely to help an organization achieve its goals without a complementary shift in work culture and work practices. Proper design of healthcare settings, along with a culture that prioritizes the health and safety of the care team through its policies and values, can reduce the risk of disease and injury to hospital staff and provide the necessary support needed to perform critical tasks. Also, it is important to identify core systemic and facility design factors that lead to failures and wastage in healthcare, and then develop new solutions (e.g. acuity adaptability, standardized rooms) that address these problems within the context of culture changes and evolving models of care. Conclusions: The physical environment along with social support, organizational culture, and technology can play an important role in improving health, safety, effectiveness and satisfaction of the healthcare team. THE ROLE OF THE PHYSICAL AND SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT IN PROMOTING HEALTH, SAFETY, AND EFFECTIVENESS IN THE HEALTHCARE WORKPLACE / 1


Synthetic aperture radars (SAR) are coherent imaging systems that produce complex-valued images of the ground. Because modern systems can generate large amounts of data, there is substantial interest in applying image compression techniques to these products. We examine the properties of complex-valued SAR images relevant to the task of data compression. We advocate the use of transform-based compression methods but employ radically different quantization strategies than those commonly used for incoherent optical images. The theory, methodology, and examples are presented.


Transition to university life can be stressful for all students. In mitigation, most universities including those in Kenya offer social support to students in form of counselling, financial assistance, health and academic support. Despite this it has been documented that only a minority of university students who experience psychological distress seek professional counselling. This paper looks at contributors to students' use of counselling services in Kenyan universities. These are classified into four: the social and behavioural issues, academic issues, psychological issues and economic issues. The study applied descriptive survey research design guided by Person Centred and Social Learning Theories. Data was collected using questionnaires, in-depth interview schedules and Focus Group Discussions. The study findings indicate that both male and female students are faced with many counselling issues such as academic, psychological, social, personal, economic, health, physical, vocational and spiritual .It can be concluded that the threat to masculine ideology encourages males to have more positive attitude towards seeking help for academic issues and that female students seek social psychological counselling to help them gain understanding of root causes of their problems. Key words: reasons, social and behavioural issues, academic issues, psychological issues, economic issues


Most of the automatic fire alarm systems detect the fire presence through sensors like thermal, smoke, or flame. One of the new approaches to the problem is the use of images to perform the detection. The image approach is promising since it does not need specific sensors and can be easily embedded in different devices. However, besides the high performance, the computational cost of the used deep learning methods is a challenge to their deployment in portable devices. In this work, we propose a new deep learning architecture that requires fewer floating-point operations (flops) for fire recognition. Additionally, we propose a portable approach for fire recognition and the use of modern techniques such as inverted residual block, convolutions like depth-wise, and octave, to reduce the model's computational cost. The experiments show that our model keeps high accuracy while substantially reducing the number of parameters and flops. One of our models presents 71% fewer parameters than FireNet, while still presenting competitive accuracy and AUROC performance. The proposed methods are evaluated on FireNet and FiSmo datasets. The obtained results are promising for the implementation of the model in a mobile device, considering the reduced number of flops and parameters acquired.


Energy has been adjudged as the source of economic growth and wealth, the basis of economic and political controversy, technological inventions and innovations, and the basis of an epochal challenge global environment. This study examined the shock effect of some causative factors influencing electricity generation in Nigeria for 46 years beginning from 1970. The objective of the study is to investigate the effect of system shock on electricity generation in Nigeria. To achieve this, the study employed the impulse response function and variance error decomposition approaches through the Vector Error correction model. The study used the approaches to capture the impulse response of the variables and the variance error decomposition to obtain the reaction of the variables to errors committed in forecasting them. The study found no significant relationship between observed variables and electricity generation in the short run. There is a unidirectional causality running from electricity generation to economic growth, installed capacity and gas consumption and an independent causality between electricity generation, electricity consumption, price of electricity, and rainfall. The responds of electricity generation to shocks from other variables in the model are relatively low and sluggish. In forecasting electricity generation, error due to gas consumption is highest followed by error due to installed capacity of electricity. The study recommends the increase in electricity generation through increased installed capacity of electricity, electricity consumption, and price of electricity, economic activities, gas consumption and the construction of small hydro generating stations in all local government areas of the country.


PURPOSE
Previous studies have found conflicting relationships between type of playing surface and injury in American football but have not taken into account possible variations in the surface conditions of outdoor stadiums due to changing weather.

METHODS
A total of 5910 National Football League team games between 1989 and 1998 inclusive were studied to determine associations between knee and ankle sprains, playing surface, and the weather conditions on the day of the game.

RESULTS
There was reduced risk of significant ankle sprains (at least 7-d time loss) for games in natural grass stadiums compared with domes (indoor stadiums using AstroTurf) (RR 0.69, 95% CI 0.58-0.83). There was also reduced risk of significant knee sprains on grass compared with domes (RR 0.77, 95% CI 0.66-0.91), although most of this reduction was related to cold and wet weather on grass (RR 0.66, 95% CI 0.47-0.93 compared with hot and dry weather on grass). In open (outdoor) AstroTurf stadiums, cold weather was associated with a lower risk of significant ankle sprains (RR 0.68, 95% CI 0.51-0.91), significant knee sprains (RR 0.60, 95% CI 0.47-0.77) and ACL injuries (RR 0.50, 95% CI 0.31-0.81) compared with hot weather in the same stadiums. Weather did not have any significant effects on the injury risk in domes. The ACL incidence rate was lower during the later (cooler) months of the season in open stadiums (both AstroTurf and natural grass) but not in domes.

CONCLUSION
Cold weather is associated with lower knee and ankle injury risk in outdoor stadiums (both natural grass and AstroTurf), probably because of reduced shoe-surface traction.


We present novel asynchronous VLSI comparator schemes which are based on recently
proposed, reconfigurable shift switch logic and the traditional (precharged) CMOS
domino logic. The schemes always produce a semaphore as a by-product of the process
to indicate the end of domino process, which requires no additional delay and a minimal
number of additional devices. For a large percentage of inputs the computations are
much faster than traditional synchronous comparators due to the full utilization of the
inherent speed of the circuits. Also the schemes are simple, area compact and stable.


In working to address growing inequality in the United States, the current federal administration favors implementation of economic development initiatives and mitigation of social programs. There has been a significant focus in recent years on the relationship between social and economic investment and studies continue to demonstrate that the concepts are interrelated. Community well being and resilience are becoming critical to measuring the outcomes of social and economic initiatives and redefining how progress is measured. Appalachia is a vulnerable region and is especially at risk of receiving cuts to federal aid for social programs and community development. Comparative case studies of two communities were conducted by collecting available data and reports related to measures of community well being and resilience, social services, and economic development and interviews were executed in the communities with social service and economic development professionals. The aim of this research was to begin to develop an understanding of the balance of social programs and economic development initiatives necessary for community well being and resilience through the lens of Transylvania County and Buncombe County, located in the Appalachian region of North Carolina. Both areas are located in the mountains of western North Carolina, have eclectic cultures, and have very similar issues even given their size difference. The assessments of and interviews in each community illustrated similar themes including affordable housing, access to transportation, and adequate living wage. In terms of the proportions of social programs and economic development initiatives which best contribute to community wellbeing and resilience in the communities studied, balance is not quantifiable. Collaboration of social programs and economic development are key to solving common issues in Appalachia and fostering community wellbeing and resilience.


Students studying Civil Engineering (CE) at the Further Education and Training (FET) colleges spend periods of time in the classroom and workshop as well as in the workplace during experiential learning. The overall purpose of education and training in the college sector is generally understood as preparing students for employability, and difficulties in colleges performing this role are well known. In this article, these difficulties are examined in a novel way. The everyday perspectives of lecturers and supervisors about student learning in their college programmes and their work experience are translated into more theoretical language, using activity theory. A theoretical argument is made, which suggests that different sites of learning create different purposes, and that these different purposes derive from a distinction between knowledge and practice, which in turn has historical roots. The study concludes by suggesting that a new, common object of integrating theory and practice at all the sites would better link the college and workplace education and training systems, and tentatively suggests how this new object could be put into practice.


In public planning processes for sustainable urban development, planners and experts often face the challenge of engaging a public that is not familiar with sustainability principles or does not subscribe to sustainability values. Although there are calls to build the public's sustainability literacy through social learning, such efforts require sufficient time and other resources that are not always available. Alternatively, public participation processes may be realigned with the sustainability literacy the participants possess, and their capacity can modestly be built during the engagement. Asking what tools might successfully align public participation with participants' sustainability literacy, this article describes and evaluates a public participation process in Phoenix, Arizona, in which researchers, in collaboration with city planners, facilitated sustainability conversations as part of an urban development process. The tool employed for Visually Enhanced Sustainability Conversation (VESC) was specifically designed to better align public participation with stakeholders' sustainability literacy. We tested and evaluated VESC through interviews with participants, city planners, and members of the research team, as well as an analysis of project reports. We found that the use of VESC successfully facilitated discussions on pertinent sustainability issues and embedded sustainability objectives into the project reports. We close with recommendations for strengthening tools like VESC for future public engagements.


KURT GODEL. Uber die Lange von Beweisen. Ergebnisse eirtes mathematischen Kolloquiums, Heft 7, pp. 23-24. By the length of a proof is meant the number of formulas in the sequence of formulas constituting the proof. An arithmetic function <f> is said to be effectively calculable relatively to a logic L if for every m there is an « such that <t>(m) = « is provable in L. 5,is defined as the logic got by allowing variables and quantification for individuals and for classes of type i or less and allowing the corresponding axioms for type i or less, but not allowing variables or quantification for classes of type»'+1 or more. Then the following theorem is stated: For every <t> which is effectively calculable relatively to St, there are an infinite number of formulas f, provable in both Si and Si+i, such that, if k is the length of the shortest proof of f in Si and I is the length of the shortest proof of f in 5i+], then k><t>(l). Moreover each of these/'s is of the same general character as Godel's undecidable proposition. In a note added during printing, Godel states that if i g 1, effective calculability relative to St is the same as effective calculability relative to Si. In this connection the reviewer thinks it worth remarking that, on the hypothesis that Si is consistent, effective calculability relative to Si implies effective calculability in the sense of Church (as is demonstrated by Church in A n unsolvable problem of elementary number theory, American journal of mathematics, vol. 58 (1936), pp. 345-363—cf. pp. 357-8). Then since it is not a difficult matter to show that effective calculability in the sense of Church implies effective calculability relative to Si, and hence relative to 5i for i g l , it follows that effective calculability relative to 5, for j | j 1 is the same as effective calculability in the sense of Church.


Purpose: Pattern hair loss is the most common type of alopecia. Standard of care involves long-term use of topical medications with limited effectiveness. Low-level laser therapy (LLLT) has become a popular alternative treatment. Here, we examine published clinical trials to establish whether the breadth of evidence supports LLLT for pattern hair loss. Methods: A literature search was conducted within the PubMed, Embase, Scopus, and Cochrane Trials databases to identify original articles evaluating hair regrowth following LLLT. Articles were selected based on use of 600–1,100 nm wavelengths, treatment time ≥16 weeks, and objective evaluation for hair regrowth. Results: Ten randomized controlled trials were included, of which 8 compared LLLT to sham device and 1 to no treatment. The study populations varied, with 3 studies evaluating only women. All sham-device controlled studies demonstrated statistically significant increase in hair diameter or density (p < 0.01) following LLLT. Discussion: Based on our review of the literature, LLLT appears to be effective for treating pattern hair loss in both men and women. These laser devices have good safety profiles, with only minor adverse effects reported. However, physicians should be cautious when drawing conclusions as some studies included have a relationship with industry.


Crowdfunding is an emerging industry in the past decades, which proliferates and has attracted an enormous population from the public to be involved in various funding projects in multiple fields such as business entrepreneurship, healthcare, and fintech. Meanwhile, charitable crowdfunding platforms such as GoFundMe, Indiegogo, and Kickstarter have allowed internet users to provide help and donation to the fundraisers directly. As the year 2020 is surrounded by the COVID-19 global pandemic spreading out the world, the topic of coronavirus relief has surged. Thus, it is worthy of evaluating the crowdfunding campaign's effectiveness during the coronavirus context by making a connection between fundraising activities and coronavirus relief. This paper aims to investigate the effects of various factors affecting a donation-based crowdfunding campaign for coronavirus relief of food donation in the United States and determine the significant factors affecting the campaign's success rate. To achieve this research purpose, secondary data were extensively collected from the crowdfunding platform GoFundMe for regression analysis. The sample data was derived from crowdfunding campaigns launched from March 1st, 2020, to May 31st, 2020. During this period, the United States was severely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic with an exponentially surged number of confirmed cases. This paper derives the independent variables that have been examined from previous studies and further applies in the coronavirus context to identify whether these factors are significant influencers to the success of crowdfunding campaigns for coronavirus relief of food donation. The factors being examined include target funding amount, the existence of spelling mistakes, the presence of pictures, video, social network sites, project updates, comments between fundraisers and backers, and links to external websites. That the significant factors contributing to a successful funding project are similar, as identified in previous reward-based and equity crowdfunding studies. On the other hand, several independent variables' effectiveness varied between the normal scenario and the coronavirus context, as such variables demonstrate a much compelling role to attract donors for the coronavirus relief activations. The analysis is valuable and worthy of different viewpoints. First, understanding the donor's motivation and the success features of funding projects is valuable for fundraisers to have a strategic mindset for decision-making criteria when initiating funding projects to attract more donors and the amount of money. Second, because of the lack of literature focusing on examining the success features for donation-based crowdfunding campaigns, this study fills the gap and further focus on the crowdfunding activations in the context of coronavirus food relief in the US. Therefore, this study provides significant insight to understand the dynamics of the donation-based crowdfunding campaign and provides a recommendation to develop coronavirus relief more efficiently.


New biologically active β-lactams were designed and synthesized, developing novel antibiotics and enzymatic inhibitors directed toward specific targets.
Within a work directed to the synthesis of mimetics for RGD (Arg-Gly-Asp) sequence able to interact with αvβ3 and α5β1-type integrins, new activators were developed and their Structure-Activity Relationships (SAR) analysis deepened, enhancing their activity range towards the α4β1 isoform. Moreover, to synthesize novel compounds active both against bacterial infections and pulmonary conditions of cystic fibrosis patients, new β-lactam candidates were studied. Among the abundant library of β-lactams prepared, mainly with antioxidant and antibacterial double activities, it was identified a single lead to be pharmacologically tested in vivo. Its synthesis was optimized up to the gram-scale, and pretreatment method and HPLC-MS/MS analytical protocol for sub-nanomolar quantifications were developed. Furthermore, replacement of acetoxy group in 4-acetoxy-azetidinone derivatives was studied with different nucleophiles and in aqueous media. A phosphate group was introduced and the reactivity exploited using different hydroxyapatites, obtaining biomaterials with multiple biological activities. Following the same kind of reactivity, a small series of molecules with a β-lactam and retinoic hybrid structure was synthesized as epigenetic regulators. Interacting with HDACs, two compounds were respectively identified as an inhibitor of cell proliferation and a differentiating agent on steam cells. Additionally, in collaboration with Professor L. De Cola at ISIS, University of Strasbourg, some new photochemically active β-lactam Pt (II) complexes were designed and synthesized to be used as bioprobes or theranostics.
Finally, it was set up and optimized the preparation of new chiral proline-derived α-aminonitriles through an enantioselective Strecker reaction, and it was developed a chemo-enzymatic oxidative method for converting alcohols to aldehydes or acid in a selective manner, and amines to relative aldehydes, amides or imines. Moreover, enzymes and other green chemistry methodologies were used to prepare Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (APIs).


A visual-servo type remotely operated vehicle (ROV) system with binocular wide-angle lens was developed to survey submarine resources, decontaminate radiation from mud in dam lake and so on. This paper explores the experiments on regulator performance and underwater docking of the robot system utilizing Genetic Algorithm (GA) for real-time recognition of the robot's relative position and posture through 3D marker. The visual servoing performances have been verified as follows; (1) The stability performances of the proposed regulator system have been evaluated by exerting abrupt distrubane force while the ROV is controlled by visual servoing. (2) The proposed system can track time-variant desired target position in x-axis (front-back direction of the robot). (3) The underwater docking can be completed by switching visual servoing and docking modes based on the error threshold, and by giving time-varying desired target position and orientation to the controller as a desired pose.