Atomic force microscopy (AFM) is a promising tool to visualize biomolecules at the sub-nanometer scale. Experimentally obtained AFM images have been compared with the simulated ones; however, such conventional images of biomolecules were usually computed by calculating equidistance surface from given atomic positions, not by calculating force. Here, we use a polymer model of a chromosome, as a representative biomolecule, and the AFM probe, and computed isoforce surfaces upon the fiber. The oscillation of probes utilized in the dynamic mode of AFM measurements was also implemented in the simulation. The computed isoforce images were clearer than the conventional equidistance ones, and a very similar images to isoforce ones were obtained when the diameter of the probe was reduced to approximately 30% in the equidistance images. Thus, the probe was found to approach very close to samples beyond the estimation of the equidistance surface, contributing clear AFM images.


We analyze the hadronic freeze-out in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions at Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) in a transport approach that combines hydrodynamics for the early, dense, deconfined stage of the reaction with a microscopic nonequilibrium model for the later hadronic stage at which the hydrodynamic equilibrium assumptions are not valid. With this {ital ansatz} we are able to self-consistently calculate the freeze-out of the system and determine space-time hypersurfaces for individual hadron species. The space-time domains of the freeze-out for several hadron species are found to be actually four dimensional, and differ drastically for the individual hadrons species. Freeze-out radii distributions are similar in width for most hadron species, even though the {Omega}{sup {minus}} is found to be emitted rather close to the phase boundary and shows the smallest freeze-out radii and times among all baryon species. The total lifetime of the system does not change by more than 10{percent} when going from CERN Super Proton Synchrotron to RHIC energies. {copyright} {ital 1999} {ital The American Physical Society}


Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a global threat worldwide. Inappropriate and irrational use of antibiotics are the responsible causes for the development of AMR in the pathogenic microorganisms. In the developing countries like India the data encountered a higher burden of resistance in the rural communities. In such scenario the AMR may lead to difficulty in treatment of various ailments among human as well as companion livestock. In India cows and buffalo are considered as companion livestock. However the definition of companion livestock is slightly different in the developed countries. Most of the rural population in India is dependent on the livestock for their livelihood as the dairy farming in the rural community may contribute in the financial status of the rural population. Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus) is one of the foremost causative agent of skin and soft tissues infections among humans as well as in companion livestock. The situation is further complicated by methicillin resistance in S. aureus. The carriage of MRSA by humans and companion livestock may lead to further AMR spread to the community. In the civic health point of view, it is important to initiate appropriate interventions to tackle the problem at the rural population.


Ovulation disorders and unexplained infertility are most common infertility causes among women. The first line treatment in these cases is clomiphene citrate. This study has been designed to evaluate the essential time for growth follicle to reach 18 mm of diameter among patients who were stimulated to ovulate with clomiphene citrate. Study was experimental type and 78 women with polycystic ovary syndrome and 92 women with unexplained infertility referring to Royan Institute had taken to this study. These persons were under treatment with clomiphene citrate 100mg from day of 5-9 of menstrual cycle and follicular growth monitoring was performed by vaginal ultrasonograghy. The necessary time for follicular growth was determined separately in patients with polycystic ovary disease and unexplained infertility and its correlation with age, duration of infertility, BMI and hirsutism was studied in both groups. There was no significant association between the essential time for follicular growth groups and in both groups it was day of 14 of cycle and length of this time had no significant correlation with age, duration of infertility, hirsutism and BMI. There were more common cases of no response to follicle as absence of follicular growth or progesterone serum level less than 5ng/ml in patients with polycystic ovary syndrome. Since the average time of follicle growth in patients with PCO and unexplained infertility who were stimulated to ovulate with clomiphene citrate was the day 14 of the cycle in this study, it has been suggested in cases that follicular growth monitoring with ultrasonography or evaluation of LH peak in urine is not possible, the continuation of treatment can be scheduled on the basis that patients with have a mature follicle on day 14 of their cycle.


In the present study we examined the production of high amounts of porphyrins upon induction by d-aminolevulinic acid (ALA) in 9 bacterial strains. This was performed by solely inducing the porphyrin biosynthesis pathway. Four of the strains were Gram positive bacteria and five were Gram negative strains. All strains, except Streptococcus faecalis , produced porphyrins when incubated in PBS with 0.38 mM ALA for 4 h. Excess porphyrin production was excreted to the medium. Gram positive bacteria exhibited fluorescent emission peaks at 622 nm for the endogenous and 617 nm for the excreted porphyrins. Gram negative bacteria exhibited a 630 nm emission peak for the endogenous and a 615 nm emission peak for the excreted extracellular porphyrins. Upon illumination of the ALA induced Staphylococcal strains with 407–420 nm blue light, a decrease of five orders of magnitude was demonstrated with a light dose of 50 J cm^-2. Total eradication of the Staphylococcal strains could be achieved with a 100 J cm^-2 dose, which resulted in a decrease in viability of seven orders of magnitude. The viability of all the induced Gram negative strains and B. cereus decreased by one or two orders of magnitude upon illumination with 50 and 100 J cm^-2, respectively. This difference in the photoinactivation rate was found to be due to the distribution and amounts of the various porphyrins in the bacterial strains. The predominant porphyrin in the Staphylococcal strains was coproporphyrin (68.3–74.6%). In the Gram negative strains there was no predominant porphyrin and the porphyrins found were mostly 5-carboxyporphyrin, uroporphyrin, 7- carboxyporphyrin, coproporphyrin and protoporphyrin. In the B. cereus (Gram positive) strain the predominant porphyrin was uroporphyrin (75.8%). Although the total production of porphyrins in the Gram negative bacteria was higher than in the Staphylococcal strains, the amount of coproporphyrin produced by the latter was twice to three times higher than in the Gram negative strains. The extracellular excreted porphyrins did not contribute to the photoinactivation in any of the tested strains. Significant decreases in the Na^+ and K^+ content were detected in induced S. aureus after illumination while only small changes were observed in E. coli B. The green fluorescent protein within the cytoplasm of induced E. coli strains was only partially disrupted (by 60% only). These results indicate a partial yield of the effects generated by ^1O_2 radicals resulting from the photoinactivation of Gram negative bacteria and a successful generation of the same effects in the Staphylococcal strains.


This paper focuses on the solution to the vibro-acoustic response of a line-driven fluid-loaded plate with an elastic patch acting as a distributed inhomogeneity. The patch affects the plate's sound radiation by adding extra loading to the driving force and by scattering structural waves. When the driving force is located beneath the patch, the extra loading reduces the plate's supersonic velocity response and sound radiation. At some frequencies, however, the constructive superposition of scattered structural waves and near-field waves by the driving force outweighs the effect of patch loading and results in an increased sound radiation power. When the patch is located away from the driving force, wave scattering phenomena dominates the plate vibration and subsequent sound radiation. By examining the effect of the length and location of the patch on the sound power, it is possible to relate the changes in the sound power to the changes in supersonic velocity spectrum and velocity distribution contributed by the trapped modes in the patched area and interference between the scattered waves by the patch and the near- and far-field structural waves directly generated by the driving force.


We outline recent discourse work using a shared plans approach to modify control procedures for advanced life support systems. This effort was motivated during a recent water recovery test at NASA by a need to temporarily suspend automatic shutdown responses in the 3T control system while the crew conducted manual procedures. Discourse plans are reactive procedures executed in the RAPs reactive planning system. The parser generates descriptions of concepts in the memory of the control system. Discourse management runs concurrently with the control system and can handle a variety of interruptions and non-sequitors.


This study is a descriptive and survey type work. Main objective of this research is to explore e-learning system components needs among students of colleges of education (one year Bachelor of Education or B.Ed. degree programme) affiliated by University of Mysore, India. Needs assessment is one of the main investigative tools used by institutions to the identification of actual needs, gaps, and hidden parts in the system and other activities. Through a comprehensive needs assessment process, an institution can establish its e-learning goals. Based on this view, a researcher made questionnaire was designed and validated by experts in teacher education, ICT and e-learning field. For reliability of the tool a pilot test was carried and the Alpha Cronbach value found .8980 and classified as having acceptable. Researcher tried to find out the most high and the lowest ranks in needs of students. Also gender, type of institutions on dependency to government financial aids, types of learning subjects as background variables were studied.


The Rubber tree during its adult phase presents intermittent growth within the leaf exchange process characterized by senescence, which is a nutrient-recycling mechanism used by trees through biochemical and biogeochemical cycles. Studies including biochemical cycles are necessary in order to verify the mineral nutrients' dynamics at different leaf stages. The conservation of such nutrients is very important to optimize the growing conditions for rubber plantations which are located in soils with low fertility. This study aims to evaluate the mineral nutrients' dynamics during different leaf stages of the rubber tree, leaves were collected from the clones of RRIM-600 taken from a rubber tree plantation in Nepomuceno County, State of Minas Gerais, Brazil. Eight adult examples with leaves in different stages: B1, B2, C and D, plus senescent leaves (Sen) were selected for the study. Samples from leaves in stages B1, B2, C and D were taken from the trees at the four orthogonal points; the senescent leaves were collected from the ground after mechanically shaking the branches. The study revealed a decrease in the level of N, P, K, S, Cu and Zn during the development of the rubber tree's leaf. In contrast, during the same period the levels of Ca, Mg, B, Fe and Mn increased. The redistribution for N, P, K and Cu was higher and the relative order of macronutrient and micronutrient levels in the leaves were respectively: N>K>Ca>Mg≥S>P and Mn>Fe>Zn>B>Cu


Committing to prices that result in rationing may be more profitable than setting market-clearing prices if customers must make sunk investments to enter the market. Rationing is ex post inefficient, but it gives more surplus to lower-value customers who are the marginal consumers the monopolists want to tempt to make investments. Similarly, a monopsonist may procure some requirements from high-cost "second sources" rather than purchase only from the lowest-cost suppliers. The model contributes to the theory of auctions with endogenous entry, and it may also help explain "efficiency wages," "second prizes," and "fair" behavior.


This study, relying on an economic-theoretical approach to index numbers, proposes a framework for incorporating environmental indicators to the measurement of human well-being. Furthermore this study also proposes an improvement index which alleviates the well-known deficiency of across-time comparison of the deprivation index. The advantage of the proposed index is that it does not require normative judgement in the selection of weights to aggregate over constituent indices. Rather, within an activity analysis framework, optimally chosen weights are determined by the data. In developing the index, due emphasis is put on production with negative externalities, and directional distance functions—a very recent analytical device—are employed as a major tool to construct quantity indexes and improvement indexes.


The profound public health impact of the novel outbreak of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in 2019 has been unparalleled in the last century. Rapid spread of the disease and a high death toll fueled the development and global rollout of effective vaccines regardless of the massive inequitable access. However, some public health measures intended to control COVID-19 have had collateral effects on the control of other infectious diseases. In this systematic review, we analyze the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on efforts to control HIV in South Africa, emphasizing the social, ethical, and behavioral ramifications. The SCOPUS, PubMed, Ovid, PsychINFO, and Cochrane Library databases were searched for publications between March 2020 and January 2022. Of the 854 articles identified, 245 were found duplicated, and 609 were screened, 241 of which were potentially eligible, and 15 of which were ultimately included. Although no studies on the ethical implications were eligible for our study criteria due to insufficient primary data to perform an analysis on, we explored this topic in the Discussion section of this paper. We confirm declines in ART, PrEP, and HIV testing during the initial lockdown period, with slight variations across the South African provinces. Protecting routine services and reducing the disease burden on high-risk nations such as South Africa is imperative moving forward with the pandemic.


Activating transitions between internal states of physical systems has emerged as an appealing approach to create lattices and complex networks. In such a scheme, the internal states or modes of a physical system are regarded as lattice sites or network nodes in an abstract space whose dimensionality may exceed the systems' apparent (geometric) dimensionality. This introduces the notion of synthetic dimensions, thus providing entirely novel pathways for fundamental research and applications. Here, we analytically show that the propagation of multi-photon states through multi-port waveguide arrays gives rise to synthetic dimensions where a single waveguide system generates a multitude of synthetic lattices. Since these synthetic lattices exist in photon-number space, we introduce the concept of pseudo-energy and demonstrate its utility for studying multi-photon interference processes. Specifically, the spectrum of the associated pseudo-energy operator generates a unique ordering of the relevant states. Together with generalized pseudo-energy ladder operators, this allows for representing the dynamics of multi-photon states by way of pseudo-energy term diagrams that are associated with a synthetic atom. As a result, the pseudo-energy representation leads to concise analytical expressions for the eigensystem of $N$ photons propagating through $M$ nearest-neighbor coupled waveguides. In the regime where $N>2$ and $M>2$, non-local coupling in Fock space gives rise to hitherto unknown all-optical dark states which display intriguing non-trivial dynamics.


Microsimulation is an increasingly popular tool in the social sciences. Individual behavior is described by a (commonly stochastic) model and subsequently simulated to study outcomes on the aggregate level. Demographic projections are a prominent area of application. Despite numerous available tools often new software is designed and implemented for specific applications. In this paper we describe how a modeling and simulation framework, JAMES II, was used to create a specialized tool for population projections, the Mic-core. Reusing validated and well-tested modeling and simulation functionality significantly reduced development time while keeping performance levels high. We document how the Mic-core was built as plug-ins to JAMES II and illustrate the performance of the resulting tool. We demonstrate how the concept of a modeling and simulation framework enabled successful software reuse of available functionality and briefly report of future work.


Fresh and clean water is the substance most essential to human life. Water is a prime natural resource, a basic human need and a precious national asset. The present study is aimed to suggest some effective measures for the river water quality management with correlation studies with the help of statistical regression analysis of thirteen data points of Gagan river water in and around Moradabad. The statistical regression analysis has been found to be a highly useful tool for correlating different parameters. Correlation analysis measures the closeness of the relationship between chosen independent and dependent variables. To find an approach to water quality management through correlation studies between various water quality parameters, the statistical regression analysis for thirteen data points of Gagan river water of different sites in and around Moradabad was performed. The comparison of estimated values with W.H.O. standards revealed that water of study area is polluted with reference to a number of physico-chemical parameters studied. Regression analysis suggests that conductivity of river water is an important water quality parameter and it is found to be significantly correlated with ten parameters out of sixteen water quality parameters studied and it is moderately correlated with other five parameters. It may be suggested that Gagan river water quality in and around Moradabad can be checked effectively by controlling the conductivity of river water.


In this work we report on 3C-SiC heteroepitaxial growth on 4H-SiC(0001) substrates which were patterned to form mesa structures. Two different deposition techniques were used and compared: vapour-liquid-solid (VLS) mechanism and chemical vapour deposition (CVD). The results in terms of surface morphology evolution and the polytype formation using these growth techniques were studied and compared. It was observed both 4H lateral growth from the mesa sidewalls and 3C enlargement on top of the mesas, the former being faster with CVD and VLS. Only VLS technique allowed elimination of twin boundaries for proper orientation of the mesa sidewalls.


Aim/Purpose: The purpose of this study is to explore the correlation between contract cheating and online education in China, which has become a major concern due to the extensive promotion of online education worldwide amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Background: Contract cheating, also known as academic ghostwriting, refers to the act of students outsourcing academic assignments to third parties, who complete the work on their behalf. With the development of online education, the incidence of contract cheating is rising progressively. Whilst numerous scholars have conducted extensive research on the causes, prevention, and handling of contract cheating, the issue persists and needs further localized understanding.

Methodology: This study employs a mixed-methods approach. First, textual data on Sina Weibo, a popular Chinese social media platform, is collected and analyzed using VOSviewer and NVivo12 software. Field observation methods are also utilized for theme analysis and sentiment analysis. Second, the theoretical framework of organizational theory is applied to explain the impact of different modes of online education implementation on contract cheating. Finally, based on the findings, possible solutions to mitigate contract cheating are proposed.

Contribution: This study contributes to the literature by providing a theoretical framework to explain the relationship between online education and contract cheating in China. The study's findings highlight the importance of the mode of online education implementation when addressing contract cheating.

Findings: This study finds that online education does exacerbate contract cheating in China, and the extent of this phenomenon varies depending on the mode of online education implementation. This study also identifies the lack of academic integrity education and supervision as a major factor contributing to contract cheating.

Recommendations for Practitioners: Reducing the costs of educational organizations in combating cheating through institutional arrangements, such as establishing effective channels of communication between teachers and schools and controlling teachers' workload outside of their primary responsibilities, can help curb contract cheating.

Recommendation for Researchers: Both history and reality have demonstrated that possible solutions cannot rely solely on new technologies or single institutional arrangements. Contract cheating is essentially an unethical means of competing for scarce resources, and as long as resources remain scarce, this phenomenon will persist.

Impact on Society: As a social phenomenon, contract cheating cannot be completely eradicated through top-down policy enforcement.

Future Research: The stringent enforcement against contract cheating also involves the education regulatory and judicial departments, and their relationship is worthy of future research.


The stress–energy tensor of a matter shell whose history coincides with a null hypersurface in the Einstein–Cartan gravity is revisited. It is demonstrated that with a proper choice for the torsion discontinuity taken to be orthogonal to the null hypersurface and consistent with the antisymmetric property of torsion tensor, the modified expression for the asymmetric stress–energy tensor is automatically tangent to the hypersurface. The main differences with respect to a previous work are addressed.


Purpose- This study aims to determine the effect of the level of financing with the principle of debt financing and equity financing to profit expense ratio in Bank Syariah Mandiri in 2010-2019.
Methods- The sample selection technique uses purposive sampling. In this study, the authors used the method of multiple linear regression analysis. The data analysis technique used is the classic assumption test and multiple linear analysis.
Findings- Based on the results of the analysis shows that financing with the principle of debt financing does not affect the profit expense ratio, while financing with the principle of equity financing affects the profit expense ratio.


We describe our submissions to the 4th edition of the Social Media Mining for Health Applications (SMM4H) shared task. Our team (UZH) participated in two sub-tasks: Automatic classifications of adverse effects mentions in tweets (Task 1) and Generalizable identification of personal health experience mentions (Task 4). For our submissions, we exploited ensembles based on a pre-trained language representation with a neural transformer architecture (BERT) (Tasks 1 and 4) and a CNN-BiLSTM(-CRF) network within a multi-task learning scenario (Task 1). These systems are placed on top of a carefully crafted pipeline of domain-specific preprocessing steps.


This article reports the development and validation study of tests to assess achievements at three levels of knowledge structure, following the model proposed by Sugrue to measure problem-solving skills. This model is particularly consistent with the theoretical constructs underlying problem-based learning (PBL) methodology. The tests were constructed for a General Chemistry course in a curriculum of engineering, which implements PBL methodology at a Peruvian university. The content validation of the tests was performed, as well as a pilot implementation with Peruvian students of first year enginnering. The results obtained in omissions percentage, difficulty degree, items response pattern and the point biserial coefficient (rpb), let us to conclude that these are appropiate tools for assessing these skills, so constitute a significant contribution to future research in this line.


This paper develops a criterion of opportunity equalization, that is consistent with theoretical views of equality of opportunity. Our analysis rests on the characterization of inequality of opportunity as a situation where some groups in society enjoy an illegitimate advantage. In this context, equalization of opportunity requires that the extent of the illegitimate advantage enjoyed by the privileged groups falls. Robustness requires that this judgement be supported by the broadest class of individual preferences. We formalize this criterion by resorting to a decision theory perspective and we derive an empirical condition for equalization of opportunity that is defined on the sole basis of observed opportunity distributions. We discuss observability constraints and offer an empirical testing procedure to implement this condition. Lastly, we apply these criteria to the study of the equalizing impact of educational policy in France.


Although economic theory suggests that markets may "tip" towards a dominant platform or standard, there are many prominent examples of persistent incompatibility, inter-platform competition and standards proliferation. This paper examines the economics of forking, fragmentation and splintering in markets with network effects. We illustrate several causes of mis-coordination, as well as the tools that firms and industries use to fight it, through short cases of standardization in railroad gauges, modems, operating systems, instant messaging and Internet browsers. We conclude by discussing welfare effects of efforts to promote inter-operability.


Abstract Summary We introduce matter, an R package for direct interactions with larger-than-memory datasets, stored in an arbitrary number of files of any size. matter is primarily designed for datasets in new and rapidly evolving file formats, which may lack extensive software support. matter enables a wide variety of data exploration and manipulation steps and is extensible to many bioinformatics applications. It supports reproducible research by minimizing the need of converting and storing data in multiple formats. We illustrate the performance of matter in conjunction with the Bioconductor package Cardinal for analysis of high-resolution, high-throughput mass spectrometry imaging experiments. Availability and implementation The package, vignettes and examples of applications in several areas of bioinformatics are available open-source at www.bioconductor.org under the Artistic-2.0 license.


In this paper, we propose the application of collective network of (evolutionary) binary classifiers (CNBC) to address the problems of feature/class scalability and classifier evolution, to achieve a high classification performance over full polarimetric SAR images even though the training (ground truth) data may not be entirely accurate. The CNBC basically adopts a "Divide and Conquer" type approach by allocating an individual network of binary classifiers (NBCs) to discriminate each SAR image class and performing evolutionary search to find the optimal binary classifier (BC) in each NBC. Such design further allows dynamic class and SAR image feature scalability in such a way that the CNBC can gradually adapt itself to new features and classes with minimal effort. Experiments demonstrate the classification accuracy and efficiency of the proposed system over the fully polarimetric AIRSAR San Francisco Bay data set.


The ability to respond timely and cost effectively is bringing rapid manufacturing techniques into the mainstream production/repair arena. The Army can benefit from such technologies to avoid long lead times and high costs of procuring and inventorying replacement parts. But, a technology that offers versatility in terms of product size, cost and the ability to fabricate production components rapidly is yet to be available. This paper describes thermal spray technologies as applied to rapid manufacturing, part refurbishing and reengineering. A hybrid thermal spray system that can deposit a variety of materials with high throughput and density has been developed. Several generic materials that can meet the functional requirements of many parts and at the same time can be easily deposited by a thermal spray technique are discussed. An expert system software assisting the operator from CAD information, reverse engineering to part refurbishing is presented. Examples on the use of multiple schemes to remanufacture a part are also discussed. These schemes offer new avenues to fabricate replacement parts and/or salvage damaged parts and can benefit the Army considerably.


K aposi sarcoma (KS) is a human herpesvirus 8–associated multifocal, angioproliferative tumor that occurs in cutaneous, mucocutaneous, and visceral locations. The presentation of KS in the oral cavity is of prognostic importance as it may be the initial manifestation of generalized KS or even the sentinel clue to human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection and AIDS. Oral cavity KS is also associated with higher death rates when compared with cutaneous KS alone. Furthermore, oral cavity KS is a prognostic marker of an individual's response to highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART). Despite the role of HAART in effecting stabilization, regression, and a significant reduction in the incidence and morbidity of KS, adverse clinical events that are temporally associated with the onset of HAART are being increasingly recognized. Immune reconstitution inflammatory syndrome (IRIS) is characterized by an exuberant immune-mediated inflammatory response to latent antigenic triggers after the initiation or resumption of HAART. It results in the appearance or recurrence of previously treated or undetected opportunistic infections, the flare of viral infections, and the development of neoplasms. To date, however, airway obstruction as a manifestation of a KS flare after HAART is undocumented in the global literature (to our knowledge).


Objective: The aim of this study was to find the association of postprandial blood glucose with hypercoagulability in comparison to fasting blood sugars(FBS) in diabetic and healthy patients. Methods: The present study involved a total of 156 patients, of which 78 were taken as cases (diabetics) and other 78 as controls (non-diabetics). Laboratory analysis included prothrombin time (PT), activated partial thromboplastin time (APTT), fibrinogen assay done along with fasting, and postprandial sugars. Results: Platelets in diabetics and healthy controls were in normal range. Decrease in PT and partial thromboplastin time was noted in diabetics compared to non-diabetic controls. Fibrinogen levels were increased in cases compared to controls. Changes in PT values were more significant with postprandial blood sugar (PPBS) levels when compared to FBS levels, and APTT follows the same pattern with more in PPBS levels and FBS levels in diabetics. PPBS showed elevated fibrinogen when compared to FBS in diabetics as well as non-diabetics. Conclusion: Type 2 diabetes mellitus is a hypercoagulable state as proven by the following results of our study.


Why do your customers choose to buy from you rather than from your competition? For the past three years, marketing professors Mark Vandenbosch and Niraj Dawar have posed that question to more than 1,500 senior executives in interviews and group discussions. And despite the vast range of industries represented by the executives they probed, the responses they got were remarkably similar.

The executives agreed almost universally that offering great products, technologies or services is merely the entry stake into the competitive arena. Most spoke of the need to maintain an edge in the way their companies interact with customers; that is, they recognized that customers often value how they interact with their suppliers as much or more than what they actually buy. As the main drivers of customer choice, the executives cited cost-oriented factors such as convenience, ease of doing business, product support and risk-oriented factors such as trust, confidence and the strength of relationships.

Strategies built around reducing customers' interaction costs and risk are strategies that offer a systematic way to tap into new sources of customer value while avoiding the often futile attempt to compete on product innovation. The authors illustrate five different strategies that some companies are using to build a sustainable advantage through their approach to customers. These strategies are not easy to devise or implement; they require creativity, imagination, hard work and a willingness to take risks. But as the examples in this article demonstrate, the rewards are more than worth the effort.


The stromal cell-derived factor-1 (SDF-1)/chemokine C-X-C receptor 4 (CXCR4) axis plays a critical role in homing and engraftment of hematopoietic stem/progenitor cells (HSCs) during bone marrow transplantation. To investigate the transcriptional regulation provided by this axis, we performed the first differential transcriptome profiling of human cord blood CD34(+) cells in response to short-term exposure to SDF-1 and identified a panel of genes with putative homing functions. We demonstrated that CD9, a member of the tetraspanin family of proteins, was expressed in CD34(+)CD38(-/lo) and CD34(+)CD38(+) cells. CD9 levels were enhanced by SDF-1, which simultaneously down-regulated CXCR4 membrane expression. Using specific inhibitors and activators, we demonstrated that CD9 expression was modulated via CXCR4, G-protein, protein kinase C, phospholipase C, extracellular signal-regulated kinase, and Janus kinase 2 signals. Pretreatment of CD34(+) cells with the anti-CD9 monoclonal antibody ALB6 significantly inhibited SDF-1-mediated transendothelial migration and calcium mobilization, whereas adhesion to fibronectin and endothelial cells was enhanced. Pretreatment of CD34(+) cells with ALB6 significantly impaired their homing to bone marrow and spleen of sublethally irradiated NOD/SCID (nonobese diabetic/severe combined immune-deficient) mice. Sorted CD34(+)CD9(-) cells displayed lower bone marrow homing capacity compared with that of total CD34(+) cells. CD9 expression on homed CD34(+) cells was significantly up-regulated in vivo. Our results indicate that CD9 might possess specific functions in HSC homing.


In recent years, advances in high throughput sequencing technology have led to a need for specialized methods for the analysis of digital gene expression data. While gene expression data measured on a microarray take on continuous values and can be modeled using the normal distribution, RNA sequencing data involve nonnegative counts and are more appropriately modeled using a discrete count distribution, such as the Poisson or the negative binomial. Consequently, analytic tools that assume a Gaussian distribution (such as classification methods based on linear discriminant analysis and clustering methods that use Euclidean distance) may not perform as well for sequencing data as methods that are based upon a more appropriate distribution. Here, we propose new approaches for performing classification and clustering of observations on the basis of sequencing data. Using a Poisson log linear model, we develop an analog of diagonal linear discriminant analysis that is appropriate for sequencing data. We also propose an approach for clustering sequencing data using a new dissimilarity measure that is based upon the Poisson model. We demonstrate the performances of these approaches in a simulation study, on three publicly available RNA sequencing data sets, and on a publicly available chromatin immunoprecipitation sequencing data set.


OBJECTIVES
The main objective is to study the contribution of illness and medication beliefs to treatment adherence in patients with rheumatoid arthritis.

METHODS
the design was a cross-sectional study. The compliance Questionnaire for Rheumatology (CQR) was used to measure therapeutic adherence. The beliefs about medicines questionnaire (BMQ) and the brief illness perception questionnaire (IPQ-b) were used to assess patient's beliefs about medicines and about the disease. Other factors studied were treatment satisfaction, patient´s demographic and clinical characteristics.

RESULTS
144 patients were included in the study, 113 (78.4%) patients showed good treatment adherence. Patients with poor adherence presented higher scores in the BMQ harm domain (13±5 vs. 11±3, p= 0.013). Meanwhile, patients with good adherence presented higher scores in the necessity BMQ domain (21±3 vs. 20±3, p= 0.015), increased feeling of treatment control (8.8± 1.5 vs. 7.7± 2.1,p= 0.008), higher emotional response (6.2±3.1 vs. 4.8±3.4,p= 0.042) and a higher level of treatment satisfaction (77.2±12.4 vs. 69.9±12.5,p=0.004). In a multivariate analysis for each unit of increase in the score of BMQ´s harm domain, adherence was reduced by 20% (CI 95% 0.08-0.3, p= 0.001); for each unit of increase in treatment control item of the IPQ-b, adherence increased 1.4 times (CI 95% 1.1-1.8,p= 0.006); and for each unit of increase in the emotional response item of the IPQ-b, adherence increased 1.3 times (CI 95% 1.1-1.5,p= 0.002).

CONCLUSION
in our cohort of RA patients, good adherence is associated with stronger treatment necessity perception, stronger feeling of treatment control, higher emotional response and higher level of treatment satisfaction; on the other side, patients with poor adherence had stronger beliefs of medicines as harmful substances.


Fifty-eight percent of the world's blind live in Asia. More than half of these cases are due to treatable cataracts and most of the rest are due to preventable diseases, yet less than 2% of the population have access to modern eye care. With these figures in mind, it was appropriate that the theme of the well-organized and well-attended 26th International Congress of Ophthalmology was "Prevention of Blindness." The publication of these three volumes coincided with that event. "... the general reader who is unfamiliar with Asian and third-world ophthalmology will find many selections interesting and enlightening." These slim books are glossy and colorful. The World's Major Blinding Conditions (volume 3) will most interest the general reader. No bibliographic citations are given, and no scientific reports are included. This work is a history and celebration of the myriad institutions, especially the "International Association for the Prevention of Blindness," involved in philanthropic


This paper presents scheduling of packet transmission schemes, calledbaked-potatoschemes, which are used to avoid simultaneous arrival of packets at a switch. We present scheduling schemes for any capacity of links and switches. The schemes are evaluated by the maximal length of time between two successive schedulings of a processor. For the case of a single-capacity link and switch, our scheme is proved optimal by presenting a matching lower bound. Our baked-potato scheme does not assume any prior knowledge on the source?destination demands and can be used for sending control packets and broadcasting.


The Department of the Environment's Land Use Change Statistics (LUCS) represent a major new data series in the field of town and regional planning. They begin to fill a long-standing and, given the land management aims of planning, rather basic gap in the planning data record and have the potential to change the way in which we approach land-use studies and policy monitoring. LUCS data are derived from the process of updating Ordnance Survey mapping and, as a consequence, are recorded with a time lag between date of change and date of survey that varies according to survey regime and land-use type. In the analysis of LUCS data it is essential that an appropriate allowance is made for both the temporal and the spatial incidence of survey lags. In this paper we will discuss three approaches to reducing the impact of recording lags on particular types of substantive research: use of LUCS data based on analysis by survey year, the construction of robust indicators of land-use change, and the fitting of modelled lag descriptions. We conclude with a brief discussion of the implications for land-use theory in general.


Data from the large and diverse Adirondack Lake Survey were used to calibrate four simple organic acid analog models in an effort to quantify the influence of naturally occurring organic acids on lake water pH and acid-neutralizing capacity (ANC). The organic acid analog models were calibrated to observations of pH, dissolved organic carbon (DOC), and organic anion (An−) concentrations from a reduced data set representing 1128 individual lake samples, expressed as 41 observations of mean pH, in intervals of 0.1 pH units from pH 3.9 to 7.0. Of the four organic analog approaches examined, including the Oliver et al. (1983) model, as well as monoprotic, diprotic, and triprotic representations, the triprotic analog model yielded the best fit (r2 = 0.92) to the observed data. Moreover, the triprotic model was qualitatively consistent with observed patterns of change in organic solute charge density as a function of pH. A low calibrated value for the first H+ dissociation constant (pKal = 2.62) and the observation that organic anion concentrations were significant even at very low pH (<4) indicate that naturally occurring organic solutes in these waters have strongly acidic functional groups. Inclusion of organic acidity in model calculations resulted in good agreement between measured and predicted values of lake water pH and ANC. Assessments to project the response of surface waters to future changes in atmospheric deposition, through the use of acidification models, will need to include representations of organic acids in model structure to make accurate predictions of pH and ANC.


Abstract This article explores arguments among medico-legal experts (including Amariah Brigham, Isaac Ray, John P. Gray, and W. A. Hammond) about the social and moral ramifications of expanding the definition of insanity to include moral insanity. This is an important corrective to a standard view that sees the movement to transform the insanity defense in nineteenth-century America as a rejection of the explanatory power of human depravity in the face of an optimistic understanding of human nature as found in Scottish common sense philosophy. The debate, especially between Ray and Brigham, on the one hand, and Gray, on the other, finally led to a situation in which religious discussions of sin, the will, grace, and the shape of the human self were legally sidelined.


In this work, we studied the effect of intracellular 3′,5′‐cyclic adenosine monophosphate (cAMP) on Li+ transport in SH‐SY5Y cells. The cells were stimulated with forskolin, an adenylate cyclase activator, or with the cAMP analogue, dibutyryl‐cAMP. It was observed that under forskolin stimulation both the Li+ influx rate constant and the Li+ accumulation in these cells were increased. Dibutyryl‐cAMP also increased Li+ uptake and identical results were obtained with cortical and hippocampal neurons. The inhibitor of the Na+/Ca2+ exchanger, KB‐R7943, reduced the influx of Li+ under resting conditions, and completely inhibited the effect of forskolin on the accumulation of the cation. Intracellular Ca2+ chelation, or inhibition of N‐type voltage‐sensitive Ca2+ channels, or inhibition of cAMP‐dependent protein kinase (PKA) also abolished the effect of forskolin on Li+ uptake. The involvement of Ca2+ on forskolin‐induced Li+ uptake was confirmed by intracellular free Ca2+ measurements using fluorescence spectroscopy. Exposure of SH‐SY5Y cells to 1 mm Li+ for 24 h increased basal cAMP levels, but preincubation with Li+, at the same concentration, decreased cAMP production in response to forskolin. To summarize, these results demonstrate that intracellular cAMP levels regulate the uptake of Li+ in a Ca2+‐dependent manner, and indicate that Li+ plays an important role in the homeostasis of this second messenger in neuronal cells.


Seed bank dynamics of three co-occurring, non-sprouting Banksia species (B. baxteri, B. speciosa and B. coccinea) in patch-burnt scrub-heath (aged 10 and 21 years) were studied in the southern sandplains of Western Australia. In the younger plants, canopy seed storage was highest in B. coccinea. However, 21-year-old B. coccinea stored an order of magnitude fewer seeds than the other species and no more than young B. coccinea. Seed storage per year increased exponentially with plant age in B. speciosa and B. baxteri, whereas a quadratic function, peaking at 16 years, best described seed storage in B. Coccinea. Degree of serotiny was lowest in B. coccinea. Seed abortion did not vary between age cohorts but was highest in B. coccinea. Granivory ranged from 18 to 42% and was highest in the older plants and in B. baxteri. Cockatoos removed about 20% of cones in B. baxteri and B. coccinea and 10% in B. speciosa. Experimental cone removal accelerated follicle opening, especially in B. coccinea, irrespective of whether cones were placed on the ground (simulating cockatoo removal) or reattached to the plant (simulating plant death). Half the 21-year-old B. coccinea were dead and the remainder were considered senescent, as most branches showed dieback and cone fertility had fallen to 8%. Death of the other species was negligible, with cone fertility rising to a mean of 45% (B. speciosa) and 66% (B. baxteri). Interfire establishment was significant only in B. coccinea. The build-up of a viable seed bank with time occurred at a slower rate than for non-sprouting banksias in the northern sandplains.


Farrell places Harriet Beecher Stowe's abolitionist novel Uncle Tom's Cabin in the context of the nineteenth-century movement for education reform. Her essay explores the novel's representation of pedagogy and adoption and how these techniques worked simultaneously to incorporate racial outsiders and mark them as separate from the religious educators who taught and cared for them. Stowe drew these strategies from James Janeway's seventeenth-century Token for Children storybooks, which evangelicals actively reprinted and adapted for use in Sunday schools in Stowe's time. These token stories revolve around dying child "saints," of whom Stowe's character Eva is one iteration. Upon death, these ideal children leave a powerful emotional memory that can transform incorrigible children into eager students. As the example of Mary Martha Sherwood's The History of Little Henry and His Bearer shows, the pedagogic formula from Janeway's original Token books was re-imagined in the nineteenth century to involve colonial missionaries working in imperial outposts such as India. Thus the character Topsy in Uncle Tom's Cabin becomes both the object of a colonizing, missionary effort within the nation and an example with which Stowe can imagine ex-slaves becoming part of American society without changing its character. The intimacy created by adoption and loving education becomes a tool for garnering submission from racial outsiders.


A least-squares fitting technique for the carrier phase component in fringe projection profilometry is presented. The carrier phase distribution for an arbitrary measurement system can be perfectly described with a rational function, whose coefficients can be estimated by least-squares fitting to the measured reference phases, so that the restrictions and limitations in the existing techniques are eliminated.


Post-earthquake highway bridge repair is an ever-present part of the lifecycle of transportation systems in seismic regions. These repairs require multi-level decisions involving various stakeholders with differing values. The improvement of the repair decision process, repair decision itself, and repair decision outcomes, requires an evaluation of current practices in post-earthquake repair decision-making.This dissertation assesses these current practices within the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans), outlines areas where the current process is ineffective, and highlights areas for improvement. Current repair decision-making practice is focused on the repair of individual bridges given a limited set of established repair methods. To improve upon these practices, this dissertation presents the Bridge Repair Decision Framework (BRDF), a new and unique methodology that allows for simultaneous consideration of all earthquake-damaged bridges as individual elements of a larger regional transportation system. This systematic approach enables the achievement of short- and long-term transportation system performance objectives while accounting for engineering, construction, financing, and public policy constraints. Furthermore, the BRDF allows for continuous refinement of the decision-making process to incorporate engineering and construction innovations, changes in the financial and public policy environment and, most importantly, changes in transportation system performance goals. While existing methodologies allow the incorporation of some of these changes, the BRDF provides a flexible structure that can account for all of these changes simultaneously. This is accomplished through a rigorous, performance-based, and risk-informed decision-making approach that presents repair decisions using a traditional engineering demand-capacity inequality. As a result, the BRDF empowers decision-makers with a holistic understanding of the transportation network condition on a microscopic (bridge) as well as macroscopic (overall system) level. The BRDF also accounts for the probabilistic nature of the earthquake hazard, bridge seismic capacity, and subsequent repair decisions, providing decision-makers with transparency regarding the uncertainties of system condition, repair method reliability, construction workforce availability, and public and business risks. BRDF decision-outcomes are technology-neutral as a result, greatly expanding the range of repair method alternatives that a decision-maker may consider while allowing for tradeoffs to be made between performance, cost, and time in light of transportation system condition and constraints. The BRDF is validated using a simulated bridge system case study that requires post-earthquake repair. This study was designed to demonstrate the functionality of the framework and to examine two alternate decision-making strategies: one with complete and the other with incomplete post-earthquake bridge damage state information. This case study led to refinements in the framework and insights about the benefits of additional information on the damage state of bridges in terms of overall repair time and cost of the regional transportation system. Additionally, the validation revealed areas where the current BRDF can be improved in future studies. The BRDF was created for large public transportation organizations such as the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans), where implementation of the BRDF requires several important prerequisites, including new database creation and additional training for engineers. Once implemented however, the BRDF allows decision-makers to potentially reduce repair costs and times, minimize system downtime, make better investments, and account for transportation system performance goals given current financial and public policy constraints.


Abstract Hydrology is a major environmental factor determining plant fitness, and hydrological niche segregation (HNS) has been widely used to explain species coexistence. Nevertheless, the distribution of plant species along hydrological gradients does not only depend on their hydrological niches but also depend on their seed dispersal, with dispersal either weakening or reinforcing the effects of HNS on coexistence. However, it is poorly understood how seed dispersal responds to hydrological conditions. To close this gap, we conducted a common‐garden experiment exposing five wind‐dispersed plant species (Bellis perennis, Chenopodium album, Crepis sancta, Hypochaeris glabra, and Hypochaeris radicata) to different hydrological conditions. We quantified the effects of hydrological conditions on seed production and dispersal traits, and simulated seed dispersal distances with a mechanistic dispersal model. We found species‐specific responses of seed production, seed dispersal traits, and predicted dispersal distances to hydrological conditions. Despite these species‐specific responses, there was a general positive relationship between seed production and dispersal distance: Plants growing in favorable hydrological conditions not only produce more seeds but also disperse them over longer distances. This arises mostly because plants growing in favorable environments grow taller and thus disperse their seeds over longer distances. We postulate that the positive relationship between seed production and dispersal may reduce the concentration of each species to the environments favorable for it, thus counteracting species coexistence. Moreover, the resulting asymmetrical gene flow from favorable to stressful habitats may slow down the microevolution of hydrological niches, causing evolutionary niche conservatism. Accounting for context‐dependent seed dispersal should thus improve ecological and evolutionary models for the spatial dynamics of plant populations and communities.


The results of a two year survey of eye problems among the patients at the Palo Seco Hospital in the Canal Zone are presented. Only two patients, one classified as having lepromatous leprosy and the other as having the tuberculoid form of the disease, failed to exhibit ocular complications. The high prevalence of leprotic ocular disease (96%) is most probably due to the advanced age of the patients, the lengthy duration of their illness, and the high percentage of patients afflicted by the lepromatous form of the disease.


: The article presents results of evaluation of a priori and a posteriori occupational risks for workers engaged into underground mining. Evidence is that work conditions of major occupational groups of workers engaged into underground mining, according to workplace certification, correspond to 3 class 3 jeopardy degree. A priori risk of diseases development corresponds to high (unbearable). Evaluation of cause-effect relationship between health disorders and work conditions revealed a medium degree of occupational conditionality for vascular regulation disorders and metabolic disorders, that can be considered as cardiorisk indicators.


This paper presents a game theoretic approach to the routing of multiple real-time multimedia streams through multiple shared links with different link quality metrics. The objective of the proposed method is to achieve fairness and bandwidth efficiency for each stream in the utilization of high quality links. Traditionally this task is managed through pricing and service agreement, and the solutions are frequently sub- optimal. In this paper, the problem of path link sharing among multiple streams is formulated as a non-corporative QoS game. Each stream is a player, whose strategy space is the percentage of utilization of the high quality links. A unique payoff function is introduced, and each player attempts to maximize its expected payoff independently. The existence and uniqueness of a Nash equilibrium (NE) is analyzed. Numerical experiments are conducted, and the results demonstrate that the NE solutions are optimal in maximizing the successful transmission of individual streams.


Perseverative (A-not-B) errors during the search of a hidden object were recently described in both dogs and 10-month-old infants. It was found that ostensive cues indicating a communicative intent of the person who hides the object played a major role in eliciting perseverative errors in both species. However, the employed experimental set-up gave rise to several alternative explanations regarding the source of these errors. Here we present a simplified protocol that eliminates the ambiguities present in the original design. Using five consecutive object hiding events to one of two locations in a fixed order ("AABBA"), we tested adult companion dogs and human children (24 months old). The experimenter performed the hiding actions while giving ostensive cues in each trial and moved the target object to the given location in a straight line. Our results show that in the B trials, both 24-month-old children and dogs could not reliably find the hidden object, and their performance in the first B trials was significantly below that of any of the A trials. These results are the first to show that the tendency for perseverative errors in an ostensive-communicative context is a robust phenomenon among 2-year-old children and dogs, and not the by-product of a topographically elaborate hiding event.


The nervous and immune systems consist of complex networks that have been known to be closely interrelated. However, given the complexity of the nervous and immune systems of mammals, including humans, the precise mechanisms by which the two systems influence each other remain understudied. To cut through this complexity, we used the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans as a simple system to study the relationship between the immune and nervous systems using sophisticated genetic manipulations. We found that C. elegans mutants in G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs) expressed in the nervous system exhibit aberrant responses to pathogen infection. The use of different pathogens, different modes of infection, and genome-wide microarrays highlighted the importance of the GPCR NPR-1 in avoidance to certain pathogens and in the regulation of innate immunity. The regulation of innate immunity was found to take place at least in part through a mitogen-activated protein kinase signaling pathway similar to the mammalian p38 MAPK pathway. Here, the results that support the different roles of the NPR-1 neural circuit in the regulation of C. elegans responses to pathogen infection are discussed.


This article estimates a dynamic reduced-form model of intra-firm promotions using an employer-employee panel of over 300 of the largest corporations in the U.S. in the period from 1981 to 1988. The estimation conditions on unobserved individual heterogeneity and allows for both an endogenous initial condition and sample attrition linked to individual heterogeneity in demonstrating the relative importance of variables that influence promotion. The role of the executive's functional area in promotion is considered along with the existence and source of promotion fast tracks. We find that while the principal determinant of promotions is unobserved individual heterogeneity, functional area has a high explanatory power, resulting in promotion probabilities that differ by functional area for executives at the same reporting level and firm. No evidence is found that an executive's recent speed of advancement in pay grade has a causal impact on in- sample promotions after conditioning on the executive's career speed of advancement. For high-level executives, fast tracks appear to result from heterogeneity in persistent individual characteristics, not from an inherent benefit in recent advancement itself.


We studied three different types of additional coatings on sanitary ware glazes for their cleanability and resistance to mechanical and chemical wear. The additional coatings were two commercial fluoropolymer films, one experimental sol–gel-derived titania film, and an outer glassy layer fired on the substrate in two different ways. The surface chemical durability was tested by soaking them up to 7 days in a weakly alkaline detergent solution. In the mechanical testing, the surfaces were subjected to different abrasions, steel wool and a moist microfiber cloth rotated against the surfaces at a constant load. Surface topography was studied with white light confocal and scanning electron microscopy. We determined surface hydrophilicity and hydrophobicity by water contact angle measurements. The surfaces were stained with model dirt; they were then wiped with a moist microfiber cloth. The soil pick-up and removal were measured colorimetrically. The additional coatings did not markedly affect surface topology. Chemical wear by an alkaline detergent solution and mechanical abrasion by steel wool severely damaged the fluoropolymer films. Sol–gel-derived ceramic titania coating and double-glazed surfaces had satisfactory resistance to chemical and mechanical wears. Cleanability clearly increased for surfaces with the fluoropolymer and sol–gel-derived titania coatings. The glassy additional layers decreased the surface roughness, but did not affect attachment of the soil on the surfaces.


In this second part this is in their plastically deformed states that the four carbon steels Fe-xC (x varying from 0 to 1.6 wt.%C) were tested in electrochemical impedance spectroscopy. Performed in the same molar sulphuric solution and following the same procedures, these EIS runs led to Nyquist semi-circles the exploitation of which allowed specifying the evolution of the transfer resistance Rtand of the double layer capacity Cdcwith time during one hour of immersion. All these hardened steels were initially and remain in an active state characterized by low Rt values. Clear dependence of Rt and Cdc on immersion time and on the steel carbon content were highlighted, despite that the deformation ratios were not exactly the same for all steels. However the variations of Rt and Cdc versus the carbon content were inversed by comparison to the results obtained in the first part for the not deformed states. Further investigations must be done to clarify the influence of hardening on these properties, notably by imposing much higher amounts of plastic deformation


It is known that polystyrene must be chemically modified to make its surface amenable to covalent cross-linking with protein. The aim of this study was to set up a UV/Ozone system and investigate the effects of UV/Ozone treatment on polystyrene surface. Microsize polystyrene beads with an average size of 150 μm in diameter were treated with and without distilled water at the same treatment time, ozone flow-rate and UV intensity. The treated beads were analyzed by ATR-FTIR, SEM, EDX and hydrophilicity measurement. The results show that the hydrophilicity of the surface of polystyrene beads was increased after the UV/ozone treatment and the introduction of carbonyl, carboxyl and hydroxyl groups on the polystyrene beads surface was also confirmed. It was demonstrated that the UV/Ozone system was effective for treatment of polystyrene bead and the best result was obtained without distilled water.


The aim of this thesis is to investigate techniques for accurate segmentation of the hippocampus in order to measure the degree of atrophy associated with diseases such as Alzheimer's, temporal lobe epilepsy, long-lasting traumatic stress and schizophrenia. To this end, specific algorithms and methodologies are developed to segment the hippocampus from structural magnetic resonance (MR) images, in combination with pre- and post-processing operations to improve robustness and accuracy.
Segmentation efficiency is boosted by pre-processing the input image with a bias correcting spatial fuzzy c-means algorithm and a nonlocal mean filter to smooth the MRI dataset whilst preserving edges.
A 3D level set method is used to segment the left and right hippocampi simultaneously. The thesis investigates the problem of initialisation of the level set algorithm, which must cope with some challenging characteristics of the hippocampus, such as the small size, wide range of internal intensities, narrow width, and shape variation. Due to intensity inhomogeneity, using a single seed region inside the hippocampus is prone to failure. Hence, alternative initialisation strategies are explored, such as using multiple initialisations in different sections (such as the head, body and tail) of the hippocampus and 'tailored' initialisation based on superquadrics.
Accurate quantification of a segmented hippocampus can provide essential details for diagnosis, treatment planning, and follow-up comparisons. Hence, a post-processing approach to quantify the partial volume effect (PVE) for correction of the hippocampal volume is assessed. The method enables estimation of the PVE in order to generate more accurate measurements of the hippocampal volume.
The results of segmentation are evaluated on two public MRI datasets that include annotated ground-truth to identify the hippocampus. Experimental results indicate that using a single initialisation results in an average correct segmentation of only 39%, though the performance rises to 85% when using the multiple initialisations approach. These results are shown to exceed the performance achieved by other researchers for these datasets.
The analyses of corrected volumes of the several publicly available datasets are used to quantify the asymmetry in the size of the left and right hippocampi. The measure of asymmetry is applied to a set of normal scans and ones from epileptic patients. The average asymmetry values were 7% and 12% respectively, indicating asymmetry may be a useful index for diagnosis of diseases associated with the differential shrinkage of the hippocampus.


Light scattering detection in the near field, a rapidly expanding family of scattering techniques, has recently proved to be an appropriate procedure for performing dynamic measurements. Here we report an algorithm, first suggested by Oh et al. (Phys. Rev. E 69, 21106 (2004)), based on the evaluation of the exposure time dependent spectrum (ETDS), which makes it possible to measure the fast dynamics of a colloidal suspension with the aid of a simple near field scattering apparatus and a CCD camera. The algorithm consists in acquiring static spectra in the near field at different exposure times, so that the measured decay times are limited only by the exposure time of the camera and not by its frame rate. The experimental set-up is based on a modified microscope, where the light scattered in the near field is collected by a commercial objective, but (unlike in standard microscopes) the light source is a He-Ne laser which increases the instrument sensitivity. The apparatus and the algorithm have been validated by considering model systems of standard spherical nano-particle.


Eukaryotic cell division requires the mitotic spindle, a microtubule (MT)-based structure which accurately aligns and segregates duplicated chromosomes. The dynamics of spindle formation are determined primarily by correctly localising the MT nucleator, γ-Tubulin Ring Complex (γ-TuRC), within the cell. A conserved MT-associated protein complex, Augmin, recruits γ-TuRC to pre-existing spindle MTs, amplifying their number, in an essential cellular phenomenon termed 'branching' MT nucleation. Here, we purify endogenous, GFP-tagged Augmin and γ-TuRC from Drosophila embryos to near homogeneity using a novel one-step affinity technique. We demonstrate that, in vitro, while Augmin alone does not affect Tubulin polymerisation dynamics, it stimulates γ-TuRC-dependent MT nucleation in a cell cycle-dependent manner. We also assemble and visualise the MT-Augmin-γ-TuRC-MT junction using light microscopy. Our work therefore conclusively reconstitutes branching MT nucleation. It also provides a powerful synthetic approach with which to investigate the emergence of cellular phenomena, such as mitotic spindle formation, from component parts.


For road tunnels with and without smoke extraction, the control of longitudinal airflow is essential in order to limit smoke propagation in case of fire. Various concepts for the handling of longitudinal airflow have been investigated. These include jet fans, the use of (semi-)transverse ventilation, directed point air injection (Saccardo-nozzles), local air extraction, air curtains and mechanical curtains. At present, the application of jet fans is the standard solution, but not necessarily the optimum for all applications. Jet fan installation in the traffic envelope often leads to problems with corrosion and accessibility for maintenance and repair. Jet fans require extra space under the ceiling or in niches. This may lead to high additional costs if jet fans have to be retrofitted during ventilation system upgrades in existing tunnels. Particular attention is paid to the rededication of existing supply air ducts in tunnels with transverse ventilation systems. Many tunnels of medium lengths were equipped with this kind of system when vehicle emissions were very high and the need to control the longitudinal airflow was secondary. In many of these tunnels, the distributed air extraction is going to be abolished during a safety upgrade and replaced by concentrated smoke extraction through remote controlled dampers. Distributed supply air is no longer needed because for mechanical ventilation in normal operation, concentrated extraction or longitudinal ventilation can be applied. As these supply air ducts are connected to functioning ventilation stations a new use for them suggests itself which could be an economic application of control of the longitudinal air flow in case of tunnel fires. This leads to the concept of directed point air injection, which is one of the main focuses in this investigation. Many descriptions of simulations, small-scale tests and real tunnel applications are found in the available literature. The one-dimensional calculation method by application of the energy equation and the balance of momentum is well established and very similar to that used for the design of jet fan applications. Nevertheless, some decisive parameters are uncertain and depend on the actual layout. To reduce the uncertainties, a series of tests has been performed with a full scale model of a Saccardo nozzle in an existing road tunnel. The results of the measurements and simulations are in close agreement to the assumptions applied. They enhance the knowledge about the decisive parameters. Limits for the application of point air injection have been identified.


Abstract : The allocation of processes to processors has long been of interest to engineers. The processor allocation problem considered here assigns multiple applications onto a computing system. With this algorithm researchers could more efficiently examine real-time sensor data like that used by United States Air Force digital signal processing efforts or real-time aerosol hazard detection as examined by the Department of Homeland Security. Different choices for the design of a load balancing algorithm are examined in both the problem and algorithm domains. Evolutionary algorithms are used to find near-optimal solutions. These algorithms incorporate multiobjective coevolutionary and parallel principles to create an effective and efficient algorithm for real-world allocation problems. Three evolutionary algorithms (EA) are developed. The primary algorithm generates a solution to the processor allocation problem. This allocation EA is capable of evaluating objectives in both an aggregate single objective and a Pareto multiobjective manner. The other two EAs are designed for fine turning returned allocation EA solutions. One coevolutionary algorithm is used to optimize the parameters of the allocation algorithm. This meta-EA is parallelized using a coarse-grain approach to improve performance. Experiments are conducted that validate the improved effectiveness of the parallelized algorithm. Pareto multiobjective approach is used to optimize both effectiveness and efficiency objectives. The other coevolutionary algorithm generates difficult allocation problems for testing the capabilities of the allocation EA. The effectiveness of both coevolutionary algorithms for optimizing the allocation EA is examined quantitatively using standard statistical methods. Also the allocation EAs objective tradeoffs are analyzed and compared.


Educational opportunity is unequally distributed in the United States, most notably by race and economic status. Commonly practiced in K–12 schools across the country, tracking and ability grouping serve to exacerbate those existing inequities. Recent renewed activism for racial and economic justice, coupled with concerns over learning loss due to COVID-19 school closures, makes this an ideal time for educators to reconsider a formerly well-known and ambitious whole-school reform system called the Paideia Program. The system itself is described and a comprehensive review of research and literature follows. This review demonstrates Paideia's potential to improve educational outcomes and thus help to equalize educational opportunity across demographic lines, in and of itself a rationale for updated research on its implementation and effects.


A one-dimensional photonic crystal sustaining Bloch Surface Waves (BSWs) is used as a platform for two-dimensional integrated optics. The dielectric platform shows low loss, long propagation distance and high surface field enhancement. In order to study the potential of the platform for future photonic chips, polymer ultra-thin prisms and gratings (~100 nm) are engineered on the top of the platform. This polymer layer modifies the BSWs effective index enabling a direct manipulation of light. The BSW deflection effects caused by surface prisms are observed in the near-field and Snells law is verified; then the BSW diffractions through surface gratings are experimentally and theoretically characterized. The results show a robust platform that can be used for integrated optics that includes different optical components. One of the main advantages is that these 2D photonic devices can have arbitrary shapes, which is difficult to obtain in 3D.


Previous pharmacologic studies have shown that the adrenergic system has a definite role in urinary continence. For this reason sympathomimetic agents have been used to treat stress urinary incontinence. Similarly, beta adrenoceptors blockade has been shown to be of value in achieving continence in a small group of patients. This study presents the successful results of using a beta blocker (Propranolol) in the treatment of 23 female patients suffering from stress urinary incontinence. The enhanced urodynamic response shown, particularly in the erect position, to this drug could be due to the unopposed effect of alpha adrenoceptors following beta adrenoceptors blockade, thus suggesting the presence of significant numbers of such beta adrenoceptors in the female bladder outlet and proximal urethra.


This study examines the adequacy of life insurance among married American couples approaching retirement. It improves upon previous work in two ways. First, it is based on recent, high quality data (the 1992 Health and Retirement Survey with matched Social Security earnings histories). Second, it employs new financial planning software to evaluate the life insurance needs of each household. This software embodies an elaborate life- cycle planning model that accounts for a broad array of demographic, economic, and financial characteristics. We find that a sizable minority of couples in the HRS sample are significantly underinsured. Almost one third of wives and more than 10 percent of husbands would have suffered living standard reductions of 20 percent or more had their spouses died in 1992. Underinsurance tends to be more common among low income households, couples with asymmetric earnings, younger households, couples with dependent children, and non-whites. In general, households with greater vulnerabilities do not appear to compensate adequately for these vulnerabilities through greater life insurance holdings. Among some groups, the frequency of underinsurance exceeds two-thirds, and the frequency of severe underinsurance (a reduction in living standard of 40 percent or greater) exceeds one-quarter.


Objective: To evaluate whether baseline levels of plasma and CSF HIV RNA, tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNFα), monocyte chemoattractant protein-1 (MCP-1), matrix metalloproteinase-2 (MMP-2), or macrophage colony stimulating factor (M-CSF) are predictors of incident HIV-associated dementia (HIVD) in a cohort with advanced HIV infection. Methods: A total of 203 nondemented subjects with CD4 lymphocyte counts less than 200/μL, or <300/μL but with cognitive impairment, underwent semiannual neurologic, cognitive, functional, and laboratory assessments. HIVD and minor cognitive motor disorder (MCMD) were defined using American Academy of Neurology criteria. The cumulative incidence of HIVD was estimated using Kaplan-Meier curves. Cox proportional hazards regression models were used to examine the associations between biologic variables and time to HIVD, adjusting for age, sex, years of education, duration of HIV infection, type of antiretroviral use, premorbid IQ score, and presence of MCMD. Results: After a median follow-up time of 20.7 months, 74 (36%) subjects reached the HIVD endpoint. The dementia was mild in 70% of cases. The cumulative incidence of HIVD was 20% at 1 year and 33% at 2 years. Highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) was used by 73% of subjects at baseline. A plasma HIV RNA level was undetectable in 23% of subjects and a CSF HIV RNA level was undetectable in 48% of subjects. In adjusted analyses, neither plasma nor CSF HIV RNA levels (log10) were associated with time to HIVD; log10 levels of plasma TNFα (HR 3.07, p = 0.03) and CSF MCP-1 (HR = 3.36, p = 0.06) tended to be associated with time to HIVD. Conclusion: The lack of association between baseline plasma and CSF HIV RNA levels and incident dementia suggests highly active antiretroviral therapy may be affecting CNS viral dynamics, leading to lower HIV RNA levels, and therefore weakening the utility of baseline HIV RNA levels as predictors of HIV-associated dementia.


The human microbiome is comprised of the bacteria, archaea, fungi, protists, and viruses that live in and on our bodies. It is estimated that the microbial cells that comprise your individual microbiome outnumber your own cells by a factor of 10 and that their collective gene content outnumbers your own by a factor of 100. Although scientists and physicians have appreciated the diversity of our "fellow travelers" for decades, our ability to count, study, and categorize our microbes was long limited by the challenges associated with their culture in the laboratory. The utilization of high-throughput sequencing platforms, development of new and improved bioinformatics resources, and the introduction of other 'omics technologies have shed new light on the composition and function of the human microbiome. The NIH-sponsored Human Microbiome Project characterized the microbial communities of hundreds of healthy individuals in an attempt to define the "healthy" microbiome at various sites throughout the body, and other projects have examined the human microbiome under varying states of disease and health. Microbiome and metagenomic studies have revealed that microbes may contribute to metabolic disorders, inflammatory bowel disease, heart disease, and cancer; and emerging evidence from mouse models suggests a strong link between gut microbiome composition and brain development and behavior. Microbiome and metagenomic studies have also demonstrated that our microbiota may confer protective or beneficial effects, and the depletion or loss of these "good" microbes may leave us susceptible to disease or infection. This talk will introduce the concept of the human microbiome, discuss the techniques that are used to characterize the structure and function of mixed microbial communities, and highlight recent findings from the literature. Citation Format: Emily B. Hollister. Meet your microbiome: An introduction to the who, what, and how of mixed microbial communities. [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the Thirteenth Annual AACR International Conference on Frontiers in Cancer Prevention Research; 2014 Sep 27-Oct 1; New Orleans, LA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Can Prev Res 2015;8(10 Suppl): Abstract nr PL01-01.


A hierarchical elastic computer-aided detection algorithm is proposed to automatically detect the horizon in an aerial image. A hierarchical strategy, including coarse-level detection and fine-level adjustment, is applied. First, the original image is blurred by a large-scale low-pass filter. Then, a Canny edge detector and Hough transform are successively utilized to find major edges in the image and identify lines associated with those major edges. The desired horizon is modeled by the resulting line that best satisfies certain criteria. By doing so, the general position of the horizon can be quickly detected at the coarse-level step. Since the horizon is often not a straight line, an elastic fine-level adjustment is applied to capture the precise curvature of the horizon. A quantitative performance metric is designed, and preliminary experimental results show the feasibility and reliability of the proposed algorithm.


Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to explore the clean development mechanism (CDM) which creates carbon credits from emission abatement projects in developing economies. The paper aims to examine the operation of the CDM with specific reference to fraud vulnerabilities regarding the additionality of a project. An examination of the process of establishment, certification and verification of additionality (confirmation that emissions post-implementation of the CDM project are lower than those that would have occurred under the most plausible alternative scenario) is used to highlight the need for particular vigilance in respect to sustaining and improving the integrity of future market-based mechanisms post-Kyoto. Design/methodology/approach - The study takes a case study approach, examining the CDM project cycle and associated key entities. Findings - The study posits that the processes associated with establishing and verifying additionality of a project are potentially key areas of systemic weakness that must be addressed. This case study explores the design features of the CDM that may afford greater opportunities for fraudulent or deceptive practices. Originality/value - The CDM takes a project-by-project approach to establishment, verification and certification of additionality. Whilst conceptually this design may be appropriate from an operational perspective, it potentially provides opportunities for fraudulent outcomes. The individualised approach is, by its very nature, highly resource-intensive and inherently difficult to verify.


HPM 500a or b, Independent Study in Health Policy and Management Abigail Friedman Student-initiated directed readings or supervised research under the direction of a Health Policy and Management faculty member. Enrollment requires the development of a term plan approved by a primary faculty mentor and the HPM independent study director. A term plan for directed readings shall include (a) topic and objectives, (b) applicable YSPH or departmental competencies, (c) 13 weeks of readings, (d) a schedule for meetings between the student and supervising faculty mentor, and (e) a description of a culminating written assignment to be completed by the conclusion of the term. A term plan for a research project shall include (a) a project description, (b) weekly benchmarks and activities for 13 weeks, and (c) a description of a final project or other written product to be produced by the conclusion of the term. The student and faculty mentor are expected to meet regularly throughout the term. This course is designed for M.P.H. students but is also open to other students at Yale with approval of a supervising HPM faculty mentor and the HPM independent study director. M.P.H. students may enroll in this course no more than twice for credit; each independent study must meet all requirements described above.


The article deals with the research of American poetic discourse of XXI century with the further estimation of the role performed by the category of aspect in the process of this discourse molding. The rationale of the chosen topic is dictated first of all by the dominant position of the functional paradigm in the modern linguistics, and thus by special attention addressed to the study of language units and their «deepening into life», and to interconnection of language and speech levels within the discourse. The situation described in the poem is connected with the situation when the poem is being created by the artist. Thus, the reader gets two tasks: to interpret the information given by means of poetic images, and, as much as it is possible, to deepen into the situation, in which the whole poem was created, to find out possible information about the addresser, his surrounding, position, etc. To deepen into the situation there is Continuous form of the verb, which is observed as a cross point for category of tense and category of aspect and helps to mold the poetic discourse. The article is written within the research topic «Mechanisms of Civil Society Influence upon Euro-Integration Processes in Ukraine» No15.01.10-02.16/18.ЗП.


Seemingly paradoxical characteristics of psychiatric disorders, including moderate to high prevalence, reduced fecundity, and high heritability have motivated explanations for the persistence of common risk alleles for severe psychiatric phenotypes throughout human evolution. Proposed mechanisms include balancing selection, drift, and weak polygenic adaptation acting either directly, or indirectly through selection on correlated traits. While many mechanisms have been proposed, few have been empirically tested. Leveraging publicly available data of unprecedented sample size, we studied twenty-five traits (i.e., ten neuropsychiatric disorders, three personality traits, total intracranial volume, seven subcortical brain structure volume traits, and four complex traits without neuropsychiatric associations) for evidence of several different signatures of selection over a range of evolutionary time scales. Consistent with the largely polygenic architecture of neuropsychiatric traits, we found no enrichment of trait-associated single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in regions of the genome that underwent classical selective sweeps (i.e., events which would have driven selected alleles to near fixation). However, we discovered that SNPs associated with some, but not all, behaviors and brain structure volumes are enriched in genomic regions under selection since divergence from Neanderthals ~600,000 years ago, and show further evidence for signatures of ancient and recent polygenic adaptation. Individual subcortical brain structure volumes demonstrate genome-wide evidence in support of a mosaic theory of brain evolution while total intracranial volume and height appear to share evolutionary constraints consistent with concerted evolution. We further characterized the biological processes potentially targeted by selection, through expression Quantitative Trait Locus (eQTL) and Gene Ontology (GO) enrichment analyses and found evidence for the role of regulatory functions among selected SNPs in immune and brain tissues. Taken together, our results suggest that alleles associated with neuropsychiatric, behavioral, and brain volume phenotypes have experienced both ancient and recent polygenic adaptation in human evolution, acting through neurodevelopmental and immune-mediated pathways.


Large-scale annotated datasets allow AI systems to learn from and build upon the knowledge of the crowd. Many crowdsourcing techniques have been developed for collecting image annotations. These techniques often implicitly rely on the fact that a new input image takes a negligible amount of time to perceive. In contrast, we investigate and determine the most cost-effective way of obtaining high-quality multi-label annotations for temporal data such as videos. Watching even a short 30-second video clip requires a significant time investment from a crowd worker; thus, requesting multiple annotations following a single viewing is an important cost-saving strategy. But how many questions should we ask per video? We conclude that the optimal strategy is to ask as many questions as possible in a HIT (up to 52 binary questions after watching a 30-second video clip in our experiments).We demonstrate that while workers may not correctly answer all questions, the cost-benefit analysis nevertheless favors consensus from multiple such cheap-yet-imperfect iterations over more complex alternatives. When compared with a one-question-per-video baseline, our method is able to achieve a 10% improvement in recall (76.7% ours versus 66.7% baseline) at comparable precision (83.8% ours versus 83.0% baseline) in about half the annotation time (3.8 minutes ours compared to 7.1 minutes baseline). We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by collecting multi-label annotations of 157 human activities on 1,815 videos.


Habitat degradation and loss probably has been more responsible for the decline of native fish species. Nepalese fishes are one of main aquatic vertebrates which are yet to be studied for their occurrence, distribution and ecology, especially from western regions of the country. However, before complete understanding on native fishes, threat over their existence have been loomed by climate change, over fishing, pollution, alteration of natural habitats and poor understanding of fish ecology etc. Thus, publicizing the importance and knowledge of fish conservation has been one of the most important challenges. The other challenges are sustainability of quality and quantity of freshwaters which have been impacted. In such circumstance to overcome the problems, adoption of community or cooperative based conservation could be one of the best approaches for freshwaters and fish restoration. Optimistically, a national strategy on conservation of freshwater fish is desirable. Fish conservation has the opportunities to be used for multidimensional purposes. A success of single fish species might contribute substantially on local economy, if that could be used in aquaculture or angling for tourism industry. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3126/njbs.v2i0.7492 Nepalese Journal of Biosciences 2 : 71-79 (2012)


: In cases of static or symptomatic dynamic scapholunate instability, reduction of the scaphoid proximal pole into the scaphoid fossa of the radius and stabilization of the relationship of the scaphoid and lunate by distal arthrodesis to the trapezium and trapezoid will significantly alter carpal mechanics; however, elimination of pain, preservation of a functional arc of motion, and restoration of the ability to pursue routine activities (including heavy labor) all suggest that the planes of radiocarpal and intercarpal motion following distal scaphoid arthrodesis are compatible with long-term physiologic function without late loss of reduction.


In China, the bank is facing a challenging design problem of credit contract based on inventory financing. The paper studies credit contracts based on stock document mortgage with two risk-neutral gamers. Our model includes the case of a bank offering loan to a cooperative retailer who mortgages its inventory to the bank to finance more inventory. The retailer faces a random demand in a single sales season as in the classical newsvendor problem. By game theorem, we give the optimal loan to value to retailers with different initial capital. We show the wholesale price, the storage cost and the salvage price have influence to bankruptcy risk and loan to value, as well as the initial capital. Finally, based on our model analysis, we give some advices.


Length changes of gastrocnemius muscle belly and tendon at different passive tensions and ranges of motion (ROM) were measured in 31 healthy persons and 15 hemiplegic patients with clinically demonstrated ankle joint plantar flexion (PF) contractures. Preliminary studies were done to obtain accurate determination of gastrocnemius muscle insertion and origin points on x-ray films, to calculate the magnification factor due to x-ray beam divergence and to measure the length changes in muscle belly by the use of a wire hook placed at the muscle-tendon junction. Our results revealed: (1) change in length at different passive tensions is in the muscle belly, not in the tendon, (2) in hemiplegic patients no statistical difference in elongational characteristics of affected gastrocnemius muscle bellies with clinically demonstrated ankle PF contractures and of the contralateral nonaffected muscle bellies, (3) spastic and flaccid gastrocnemius muscle bellies are not statistically different in respect to passive elongations, (4) gastrocnemius muscle bellies of both affected and nonaffected legs of hemiplegic patients were statistically different from the muscle bellies of healthy persons in regard to maximal ROM and maxinum muscle belly length changes, (5) there was approximately .5 mm change in the belly length for each degree of ankle ROM, (6) age is not a factor influencing passive elongation of muscle belly, (7) average muscle belly lengths were consistently shorter in hemiplegic muscles while their tendon lengths did not change. The enumerated findings suggest that the limitation of ankle ROM in spastic hemiplegic legs obtained by the standard clinical measurements technique represents a change in muscle belly rest length without a structural contracture of the muscle fibers.


A comparative evaluation of one-stop, computerised citizen service centres in various Indian states has been carried out in this paper to assess their efficacy. It is found that the outcomes of policies related to e-governance in India are not correlated to conventional variables such as economic development. Instead the extent to which political parties in power expect such policies to affect their current and future electoral statuses affects implementation.


Given a nonsmooth, nonconvex minimization problem, we consider algorithms that iteratively sample and minimize stochastic convex models of the objective function. Assuming that the one-sided approximation quality and the variation of the models is controlled by a Bregman divergence, we show that the scheme drives a natural stationarity measure to zero at the rate $O(k^{-1/4})$. Under additional convexity and relative strong convexity assumptions, the function values converge to the minimum at the rate of $O(k^{-1/2})$ and $\widetilde{O}(k^{-1})$, respectively. We discuss consequences for stochastic proximal point, mirror descent, regularized Gauss-Newton, and saddle point algorithms.


This article explores the dynamics of Gandhi's political emergence at the head of the Indian nationalist movement in 1919 and argues that the form of his ideology had a decisive impact in transforming the political field in India from an elite-based constitutional politics to a field of mass political participation. It argues that utopianism enabled Gandhian discourse to resolve the ideological crisis in which Indian nationalism had found itself at the beginning of the second decade of the twentieth century. Tracing the lineages of this ideological dilemma, the article then argues that utopianism permitted Gandhi to articulate a sense of cultural difference from the colonial Other based on a rejection of the modernity associated with it, while simultaneously occluding Gandhi's own modernism which he used as the basis for his programme of social reform. Examining Gandhi's seminal work Hind Swaraj , the article analyses the rhetorical strategies employed by Gandhi in order to open up this space of symbolic difference. These strategies articulated a political discourse which sought to reconcile differences within Indian society in order to project a unified difference against the colonial power. As such, it enabled a politics at once more radical than Indian nationalism had hitherto been without alienating the groups which had felt threatened by earlier periods of political 'extremism'.


Purpose: The aim of the paper is to identify the importance of actions for enhancing internal relations in a company, with the aim to improve company's relations with its environment. Design/Methodology/Approach: The studies conducted in 2018-2020 focused on the importance of relational competencies in the creation of company value and on the role of leadership. The first study concentrated on managers (N=10). The second study focused on the employees of the analysed companies (N=185). The obtained information was used to perform a structural analysis, based on structural indicators expressed as percentage values. Findings: The findings indicate that assessments of the importance of actions for enhancing internal relations in a company to improve company's relations with its environment vary. The managers of the surveyed enterprises perceive it differently than the employees. In addition, cluster analysis showed that the managers and employees are not unanimous in their assessments of the actions. Practical Implications: The results of the analysis indicate that both the management and employees recognise the importance of taking actions for enhancing internal relations in a company in order to improve company's relations with its environment. This analysis may identify the directions for building internal relations to improve company's relations with its environment. Originality/Value: Business strategy making with regard to creation and enhancement of relational competencies and relational capital, both internally and externally, is becoming a key trend in the development of operational philosophy in business. Focusing on internal relations translates into formation of external relations. Development of relational capital essentially affects the growth of an enterprise and its competitive advantage.