Strontium titanate (SrTiO3) films were deposited on (001) magnesium oxide (MgO) substrates by pulsed laser interval deposition (PLID). The growth modes of the films were monitored by in-situ reflection high-energy electron diffraction (RHEED). The microstructures were investigated by transmission electron microscopy (TEM). It has been shown that PLID can enhance the two dimensional (2D) growth of this system, which has the large lattice misfit of 7.9%. The addition of a mono TiO2 buffer layer to the MgO substrate surface further improved the 2D growth mode. TEM results revealed that the films grown in 2D mode with large lattice mismatch were dominated by antiphase boundaries (APBs) and holes. All the holes were connected by antiphase boundaries. The holes were rectangular in shape, with facets along the [100] and [010] directions, and they ran though the whole film thickness. Threading and misfit dislocations have also been identified as growth defects in the films grown with and without a TiO2 buffer layer. However, the density of defects varies with growth mode.


Parkinson's disease (PD) is the second most prevalent neurodegenerative disease and arises from dopamine (DA) neuron death selectively in the substantia nigra pars compacta (SNc) . Rit2 is a reported PD risk allele, and recent single cell transcriptomic studies identified a major RIT2 cluster in PD DA neurons, potentially linking Rit2 expression anomalies to a PD patient cohort. However, it is still unknown whether Rit2 loss itself is causative for PD or PD-like symptoms. Here we report that conditional Rit2 silencing in mouse DA neurons drove a progressive motor dysfunction that was more rapid in males than females and was rescued at early stages by either inhibiting the DA transporter (DAT) or with L-DOPA treatment. Motor dysfunction was accompanied by decreases in DA release, striatal DA content, phenotypic DAergic markers, and a loss of DA neurons, with increased pSer129-alpha synuclein expression. These results provide the first evidence that Rit2 loss is causal for SNc cell death and a PD-like phenotype, and reveal key sex-specific differences in the response to Rit2 loss.


The importance of independence as a principle of voluntary action: Independence, it is argued, is fundamental to the principle and practice of voluntary action and fundamental to the good society. Independence means, both a relative freedom from constraint and the freedom to "think, experiment, to uphold values and to challenge". It operates at three interlocking and mutually reinforcing levels:1. it means individual organizations retaining the ability to set their own objectives and manage their own affairs.2. For value-based organizations independence also implies the ability to express those values in public by exercising the freedom to combine with others to represent collective interests of citizens in wider society.3. It depends on the effective telling of a wider story about its role in society that goes beyond a narrow defence of sectional interests and that links independence of voice with the broader interests of society as a whole. The threat:Market driven reforms to the welfare state combined with austerity budgets carry three risks:• Co-optation becomes a threat when partnership structures where voluntary agencies have a seat at the table are ignored or bypassed. • Instrumentalisation becomes a threat when voluntary agencies are seen wholly from the perspective of what they can do for government as in the shift from grant in aid to contracts.• Incorporation occurs when the identity of voluntary agencies becomes submerged in the government programmes they are helping to deliver.Resistance requires voluntary and community organizartions to have the collective capacity to resist external pressures determining their role and purpose and have the opportunities to make alternative collective acts of self-definition stick.The Northern Ireland challenge:Current Executive policy is pushing further neo-liberal reform of public services in the context of frozen or reducing budgets, while the main Assembly political parties show little interest in a wider role for voluntary action. A picture familiar from other parts of the world experiencing similar reforms is made more difficult in Northern Ireland by the communal nature of politics and the legacy of an earlier stage in the peace process. Voluntary agencies are increasingly seen for what they can do, not who they are or represent. The evidence points to five main issues:• The switch to building relationships on the basis of public procurement models from a trust-based partnership model;• The need to drive down costs is making collaboration on chosen terms harder and forcing organizations to become much more competitive;• Instead there has been a loss of control over the kinds of collaboration organizations are free to enter, excluding arrangements that do not meet immediate government funders' objectives.• An ideological turn in some government departments towards a much narrower and more instrumental view of the role of voluntary organizations in public policy, driven in part by the role of political advisors and in part by what one informant identified as the ideological preferences of civil servants.• An atmosphere of fear and timidity among organizations coupled with a lack of capacity in the sector as a whole to develop new stories on what voluntary action is for. While not complete, the evidence shows processes of co-optation, instrumentalization and incorporation all well advanced. There is an urgent need to build on opportunities for voluntary and community organizations to develop the capacity to create a new story about who they are and what they represent that goes beyond delivering public services and supports collaboration and coalition-building based on shared values and overlapping missions.


Abstract  Background: The development of additional therapies for the treatment of pulmonary hypertension would be a significant advancement in the treatment of congenital heart disease. Recently, studies have found inhaled prostacyclin (PGI2) is an effective pulmonary vasodilator, comparable with nitric oxide. In this prospective interventional pilot study, we examined the physiologic effects of inhaled PGI2 in children with congenital heart disease and pulmonary hypertension. Methods: Six children (median age 6 months, range 5 to 21 months) with congenital heart disease and preoperative pulmonary hypertension (mean pulmonary artery pressure [MPAP] greater than 50% systemic) received a 15‐minute course of inhaled PGI2 intraoperatively postrepair. The inhaled PGI2 was delivered by aerosolizing the IV formulation (Flolan, Glaxo‐Wellcome) to achieve a dose of 50 ng/kg/min. Physiologic parameters measured during the medication period were compared with measurements taken during two 15‐minute baseline periods before and after the medication period. Results: Inhaled PGI2 significantly reduced the mean pulmonary artery pressure from 25 ± 3 to 21 ± 3 (p < 0.01) and improved the PaO2/FiO2 ratio from 275 ± 181 to 433 ± 285 (p = 0.01). There were no significant changes in systemic blood pressure, heart rate, or cardiac index. Conclusions: Children with congenital heart disease and pulmonary hypertension may benefit from inhaled PGI2. Inhaled PGI2 reduced pulmonary blood pressures and improved oxygenation in this small study. PGI2 acts through cyclic adenosine monophosphate mediated pulmonary vasodilation, a mechanism different from nitric oxide. In children with inadequate response to nitric oxide, inhaled PGI2 may be a useful alternative pulmonary vasodilator.


We use speaker normalization for vocoding the speech of a new input speaker by using a speaker dependent segment vocoder operating at a very-low bit rate, below 300 b/s. The normalization consists of a spectral transformation, applied on the spectral parameter vector of the reference speaker, which should improve the match between the reference and input speakers. The optimal spectral transformation is determined by an iterative algorithm that is guaranteed to converge to a local optimum, i.e., the quantization error of the segment vocoder is minimized by the normalization algorithm. We demonstrate the general algorithm by deriving a linear least squares solution for the spectral transformation. We present some results on several male and female speakers.


Human action recognition under low observational latency is receiving a growing interest in computer vision due to rapidly developing technologies in human-robot interaction, computer gaming and surveillance. In this paper we propose a fast, simple, yet powerful non-parametric Moving Pose (MP) framework for low-latency human action and activity recognition. Central to our methodology is a moving pose descriptor that considers both pose information as well as differential quantities (speed and acceleration) of the human body joints within a short time window around the current frame. The proposed descriptor is used in conjunction with a modified kNN classifier that considers both the temporal location of a particular frame within the action sequence as well as the discrimination power of its moving pose descriptor compared to other frames in the training set. The resulting method is non-parametric and enables low-latency recognition, one-shot learning, and action detection in difficult unsegmented sequences. Moreover, the framework is real-time, scalable, and outperforms more sophisticated approaches on challenging benchmarks like MSR-Action3D or MSR-DailyActivities3D.


This paper aims at studying the fundamental properties of fuzzy linear relations between vector spaces. The sum of two fuzzy relations and the scalar multiplication are defined, in a natural way, and some properties of this operations are established. Fuzzy linear relations are investigated and among the results obtained, there should be underlined a characterization of fuzzy linear relations and the fact that the inverse of a fuzzy linear relation is also a fuzzy linear relation. Moreover, the paper shows that the composition of two fuzzy linear relations is a fuzzy linear relation as well. Finally, the article highlights that the family of all fuzzy linear relations is closed under addition and it is closed under scalar multiplication.


In this paper, Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) was used for the prediction of heat conduction problems in sand cast process. The implementation of solidification modeling in a curved casting based on SPH has been described. The treatment of latent heat was introduced in SPH conduction problem by temperature compensation method, which demonstrated the role of latent heat has a great influence on the heat distribution in the casting. The temperature distribution calculated by SPH provided a great agreement with those computed through numerical software MSC.Marc, which validated the efficiency and precision of SPH simulation of heat transfer problems in sand cast process.


Our researchers took a look at a sequence of DNA known as the ACE2 gene. This gene is most well known for its role in regulating blood pressure. But in recent times, it's drawn a lot of attention from the scientific community because it may also serve as a doorway of sorts, enabling viruses like SARS-CoV-2 to infect cells. Our researchers looked at the ACE2 gene in more than 200,000 people, comparing their exact DNA sequences to see where there are differences among people. Variation in the DNA sequence of a gene is common and is sometimes meaningless. But other times, small changes in the DNA sequence can alter the protein that is made from that gene. In this case the ACE2 gene makes the ACE2 protein, which is what the SARS-CoV-2 virus interacts with. We found a lot of variation between individuals and checked to see if that variation coincided with any traits (i.e., people with variant X tend to have high blood pressure more often than people without variant X). All of the traits we looked at were non-COVID-19-related traits, meaning we haven't asked these people anything about COVID-19 yet (this is because these DNA sequences were collected before the pandemic). We found that there are a number of variations observed among people in a specific part of the ACE2 gene. These variations are expected to alter the shape or functionality of a specific part of the ACE2 protein: The part that interacts with the SARS-CoV-2 virus. We don't yet know what the real-life significance of this variation is, but it's possible that these variants decrease the protein's ability to interact with the SARS-CoV-2 virus, thus decreasing the person's likelihood of being infected. We can speculate that there will be a spectrum of vulnerability to COVID-19 among people, where some people are more vulnerable than others, and that variants in this part of the ACE2 gene may be one of the reasons. The research we presented here shines a light on this part of the ACE2 gene and may give future researchers a direction to go in as they try to figure out what makes people vulnerable to COVID-19 and similar viruses.


Most of the world's data is stored in relational databases. Accessing these requires specialized knowledge of the Structured Query Language (SQL), putting them out of the reach of many people. A recent research thread in Natural Language Processing (NLP) aims to alleviate this problem by automatically translating natural language questions into SQL queries. While the proposed solutions are a great start, they lack robustness and do not easily generalize: the methods require high quality descriptions of the database table columns, and the most widely used training dataset, WikiSQL, is heavily biased towards using those descriptions as part of the questions. In this work, we propose solutions to both problems: we entirely eliminate the need for column descriptions, by relying solely on their contents, and we augment the WikiSQL dataset by paraphrasing column names to reduce bias. We show that the accuracy of existing methods drops when trained on our augmented, column-agnostic dataset, and that our own method reaches state of the art accuracy, while relying on column contents only.


The science of cannabis and cannabinoids encompasses a wide variety of scientific disciplines and can appear daunting to newcomers to the field. The encroachment of folklore and 'cannabis culture' into scientific discussions can cloud the situation further. This Primer Review is designed to give a succinct overview of the chemistry of cannabis and cannabinoids. It is hoped that it will provide a useful resource for chemistry undergraduates, postgraduates and their instructors, and experienced chemists who require a comprehensive and up to date summary of the field. The Review begins with a brief overview of the history and botany of cannabis, then goes on to detail important aspects of the chemistry of phytocannabinoids, endocannabinoids and synthetic cannabinomimetics. Other natural constituents of the cannabis plant are then described including terpenes and terpenoids, polyphenolics, alkaloids, waxes and triglycerides, and important toxic contaminants. A discussion of key aspects of the pharmacology associated with cannabinoids and the endocannabinoid system then follows, with a focus on the cannabinoid receptors, CB1 and CB2. The medicinal chemistry of cannabis and cannabinoids is covered, highlighting the range of diseases targeted with cannabis and phytocannabinoids, as well as key aspects of phytocannabinoid metabolism, distribution, and delivery. The modulation of endocannabinoid levels through the inhibition of key endocannabinoid-degrading enzymes fatty acid amide hydrolase (FAAH) and monoacylglycerol lipase (MAGL) is then discussed. The Review concludes with an assessment of the much touted 'entourage effect'. References to primary literature and more specialised reviews are provided throughout.


Ecosystems in the North American Arctic-Boreal Zone (ABZ) experience a diverse set of disturbances associated with wildfire, permafrost dynamics, geomorphic processes, insect outbreaks and pathogens, extreme weather events, and human activity. Climate warming in the ABZ is occurring at over twice the rate of the global average, and as a result the extent, frequency, and severity of these disturbances are increasing rapidly. Disturbances in the ABZ span a wide gradient of spatiotemporal scales and have varying impacts on ecosystem properties and function. However, many ABZ disturbances are relatively understudied and have different sensitivities to climate and trajectories of recovery, resulting in considerable uncertainty in the impacts of climate warming and human land use on ABZ vegetation dynamics and in the interactions between disturbance types. Here we review the current knowledge of ABZ disturbances and their precursors, ecosystem impacts, temporal frequencies, spatial extents, and severity. We also summarize current knowledge of interactions and feedbacks among ABZ disturbances and characterize typical trajectories of vegetation loss and recovery in response to ecosystem disturbance using satellite time-series. We conclude with a summary of critical data and knowledge gaps and identify priorities for future study.


We propose the phone-dependent channel compensated hidden Markov model (PDCC-HMM) for telephone speech recognition. The PDCC-HMM is derived by modifying the conventional hidden Markov model (HMM) with the phone-dependent channel compensation vectors. The telephone speech is recognized efficiently by using the derived PDCC-HMM. Experiments demonstrate the robustness of PDCC-HMM in speech recognition and show the significant reduction of recognition error rate by 50% compared to the conventional HMM method.


Aim: To systematically review the available literature on the prevalence and clinical characteristics of headache in patients with Tourette syndrome (TS), a neurodevelopmental condition characterized by the chronic presence of motor and vocal tics. Design: We conducted a systematic literature review of original studies using three clinical databases (Medline, EMBASE and PsycInfo), according to the standards outlined in the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses guidelines. Outcome measures included both tic severity and tic frequency. Results: Our systematic literature review identified six studies on the prevalence and characteristics of headache in patients with TS (data on paediatric patients were available from five studies and data on adult patients from four studies). The proportion of patients with TS who had a diagnosis of headache ranged from 29% to 62%. Migraine was the most commonly investigated headache disorder in this patient population. The findings of the reviewed studies showed that the prevalence of migraine in patients with TS ranges between 13% and 43% and is significantly higher compared to the two control groups (p < 0.05). Discussion: The prevalence of headache in patients with TS could be higher than in the general population, with the most reliable data being available for migraine. Overall, the literature on the prevalence and characteristics of headache in TS is sparse and highly heterogeneous. Further research on the prevalence and clinical correlates of migraine, tension-type headache and other types of headache in patients with TS across the lifespan is needed to inform clinical practice aimed at improving health-related quality of life in patients with tics.


I investigate the impact of innovative work practices and information and communication technologies (ICT) use on employees' motivations. The paper provides new and interesting results on how firms can build a motivational environment. Within an original instrumenting framework, I modify what previous analyses reveal about quality circle and training participation. The results confirm the positive role of work practices such as teamwork, quality norms, formal appraisals, management recognition, and family-friendly policies. The ICT that most contributed to the development of a motivational environment are those that facilitate access to information and knowledge such as workflow, Internet, and e-mail.


Background: Rasmussen's encephalitis (RE) is a rare syndrome characterized by intractable seizures, progressive neurological and cognitive deficits associated with unilateral hemispheric atrophy. Antiepileptic drugs (AEDs) have limited effect on seizure control. Hemispherectomy of the affected hemisphere has shown encouraging results. However, anesthetic management of RE has never been reported before. Materials and Methods: Data of all patients who had undergone hemispherectomy in the neurosurgery operation theater from a period of January 1, 2015 to September 30, 2018 were collected. Preoperative, intraoperative and post-operative data were collected. Results: A total of 15 patients had undergone endoscopic hemispherectomy (M/F 7/8, mean age 12 years). Predominantly, right hemispheric involvement was seen ( n = 12). Contralateral seventh nerve palsy (upper motor neuron type) was seen in four patients. Six patients had associated cognitive dysfunction, of whom three patients had a history of delayed development of milestones. Six patients had associated hypothyroidism. Intra-and postoperative parameters are summarized in ( ►Tables 1 and 2 ) , respectively. Conclusions: Various perioperative considerations in RE includes difficulty in assessment of patients with neurological and cognitive dysfunction, associated hypothyroidism, effect of multiple AEDs on anesthetic drugs, difficult extubation, and management of postoperative medical complications. Moreover, majority of patients are children, and demands understanding pediatric cerebral physiology and various perioperative anesthetic considerations. deviation to right side. She had high-grade fever with chills


An edge data center (EDC) network infrastructure is required to flexibly deliver massive bandwidth and ultralow latency for a 5G edge cloud. Existing electrical-switching-based infrastructure, however, has been shown incapable of meeting such requirements. In this paper, we present an EDC network architecture and prototype testbed, referred to as the intelligence-defined optical tunnel network system (OPTUNS). OPTUNS consists of a set of optical switching subsystems that operate collectively to facilitate packet transport through logical wavelength-based optical tunnels. These optical tunnels are governed by a software-defined-networking-based intelligent tunnel control system, in a proactive manner. As such, optical tunnels are always made available whenever needed. In essence, OPTUNS boasts several crucial features, including high scalability, massive wavelength reuse (yielding high bandwidth), proactive optical tunnel control (yielding ultralow latency), and fault tolerance. We have built an OPTUNS testbed, including 30 optical switching subsystem prototypes, that interconnect a total of 25 racks (400 servers). Benchmarking results show that OPTUNS achieves 82.6% power saving compared with electrical spine-leaf networks. Further, our NetPipe-based experimental results show that OPTUNS invariably achieves mean and p99 end-to-end latencies of less than 17 µs, regardless of traffic load and locality.


Providing virus free potato seeds in order to increase potato production in Indonesia could be carried out by using microtuber resulting from microcutting. The growth of single node microcutting potato can initiate microtuber formation when growth inhibiting substances such as alar in combination with dark photoperiod treatment is applied. This study was aimed to elucidate the effect of alar and dark photoperiod on the date of microtuber emergence and production. The experiment was arranged in a factorial Randomized Completely Block Design in which alar concentrations i.e. 0, 10-3, 5 x 10-3, and 10-2 mg/L, served as factor I, and dark photoperiods i.e. 16, 20, and 24 hrs/day, were used as factor II. Each treatment combination was replicated three times giving rise to 36 experimental units. Data were analyzed using ANOVA (F test) followed by Duncan Multiple Range Test (DMRT) when significant effect of the treatments existed. The results showed that alar and dark photoperiod affected individually on the date of microtuber emergence, while the best alar concentration to increase microtuber production was 10-3 mg/L with 10.67 microtubers/cutting. Dark period has no significant effect on the induction of potato microtuber. Keywords: potato microtuber, alar, dark photoperiod


Based on the amino acid composition of globin, amino acid analysis and N-terminal sequencing of peptides as well as a comparative analysis of the primary structure of beaver, coypu rat and otter myoglobins with the use of the fingerprinting technique, the amino acid sequence of the major component of ondatra myoglobin including 153 amino acid residues was reconstructed. The results of a comparative analysis of the primary structure of myoglobin and the peculiarities of the functional morphology of myoglobins from semi-aquatic animals and sperm whale and the role of amino acid substitutions in the spatial structure of ondatra myoglobin are discussed.


Global warming and peak oil are drawing attention to new types of energy technologies. Since transportation is one of the main contributors to carbon emissions and one of the biggest consumers of oil, new technologies to propel vehicles are being introduced. For the automotive industry, where the Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) has had complete dominance for some hundred years, the transition to new powertrains will be challenging for the entire operation. These new powertrain vehicles must not only be developed and tested, which is an enormous challenge in itself; they must also be manufactured with the same efficiency as ICE vehicles in order to reach a competitive price. There is great uncertainty regarding which powertrain solution will become the next paradigm, or even if there will be a new propulsion paradigm as dominant as the ICE. This, in combination with the fact that these new powertrain vehicles will initially be produced in relatively small volumes, probably calls for them to be produced in current manufacturing facilities mixed with ICE vehicles. This challenge is the foundation for this research. In order to manage the manufacturing challenges related to the introduction of new powertrain vehicles, both theoretical and empirical data have been analysed in this research. The empirical data is taken mainly from interviews, the author's own observations and workshops with Volvo Cars and SAAB Automobile. In order to produce new powertrain vehicles in existing facilities, flexibility are identified as central components in this research. However, the flexibility needs to be achieved without affecting the efficiency of the manufacturing system. To achieve flexible automotive final assembly, four key flexibilities are identified in this research: Mix Flexibility New Product Flexibility Modification Flexibility Volume Flexibility To achieve these flexibilities, three key factors are identified and investigated in this research: Mixed Model AssemblyModularity Platform Strategy This research describes these key factors' relationship with one another, as well as their relationship to the key flexibilities. This research describes how the key factors are used to achieve flexibility in current final assembly, and how they can be used in future automotive final assembly. This is presented as a relationship model to combine flexibility and efficiency in automotive final assembly. A first step towards a stringent automotive product architecture-platform-vehicle structure is presented, along with key factors that are important in a successful automotive platform strategy. Guidelines are also described for how new powertrain vehicles should be designed in order to achieve as efficient final assembly as possible.


OBJECTIVES
Associational life may foster political integration or amplify division, depending on how individuals partition themselves into groups and whether their multiple affiliations embed them into concentric or cross-cutting social circles. Starting from this premise, I relate trends in associational membership to political partisanship, and ask if there is any evidence of increased political polarization in the associative patterns of Americans.

METHODS
Using GSS data (1974-2004) on affiliations to 16 types of groups, I plot trends and run multilevel models to examine changes over time in the partisan allegiances of group members and patterns of overlapping memberships.

RESULTS
The often-lamented decline in group membership affects primarily the category of single-group members and is limited to a few types of groups. The density of the network of overlapping memberships has remained stable over time and there are no real changes in the patterns of shared memberships between group types, nor do Republicans and Democrats differ in their patterns of preferential affiliation. Although political partisanship does not drive patterns of group affiliation, group members, especially those affiliated with multiple groups, are more radical in their partisan identification than nonmembers, and most types of groups have become politically more heterogeneous over time.

CONCLUSION
The puzzling finding that group types are not becoming more partisan, while group members are, leads to the hypothesis (to be tested in future research) that civil society polarization is occurring at the level of actual groups, and not group types.


While the original definition of replacement focuses on the replacement of the use of animals in science, a more contemporary definition focuses on accelerating the development and use of predictive and robust models, based on the latest science and technologies, to address scientific questions without the use of animals. The transition to animal free innovation is on the political agenda in and outside the European Union. The Beyond Animal Testing Index (BATI) is a benchmarking instrument designed to provide insight into the activities and contribution of research institutes in the transition to animal free innovation. The BATI allows participating organizations to learn from each other and stimulates continuous improvement. The BATI was modelled after the Access to Medicine Index, which benchmarks pharmaceutical companies on their efforts to make medicines widely available in developing countries. A prototype of the BATI was field tested with three Dutch academic medical centers and two universities in 2020-2021. The field test demonstrated the usability and effectiveness of the BATI as a benchmarking tool. Analyses were performed across five different domains. The participating institutes concluded that the BATI served as an internal, as well as an external stimulus to share, learn and improve institutional strategies towards the transition to animal free innovation. The BATI also identified gaps in the development and implementation of 3R technologies. Hence, the BATI might be a suitable instrument for monitoring the effectiveness of policies. BATI version 1.0 is ready to be used for benchmarking at a larger scale.


The role of the kidneys in insulin metabolism and excretion is reviewed. Removal of these organs from animals prolongs the half-life of injected labeled or unlabeled insulin. Similar findings, reversible by transplantation, are noted in patients with severe renal disease. After injection of insulin-I-131 into a peripheral vein, the concentration of radioactivity in the renal cortex of rats is nine times greater than any other tissue and 21 per cent of the administered dose is present in the kidneys at fifteen minutes. In contrast to other organs, an increase in the injected dose results in a greater proportion being localized to the kidneys. The concentration of insulin in renal venous blood is 30 to 40 per cent lower than the arterial level, and the quantity of insulin removed by the kidneys over twentyfour hours is 6 to 8 U. The renal clearance of insulin in man is approximately 200 ml. per minute. There is both direct and indirect evidence that insulin is filtered at the glomerulus and almost completely reabsorbed and degraded by cells lining the proximal convoluted tubules. This mechanism accounts for 50 to 60 per cent of the renal uptake of insulin, the remaining 40 to 50 per cent being removed from the postglomerular peritubular capillaries. The amount of insulin excreted in the urine is less than 2 per cent of the filtered load and the urinary clearance is 0.1-0.5 ml. per minute. This clearance is constant over a wide range of serum levels and is thus a useful reflection of the mean serum level over a period of time. These observations explain the fall in insulin requirements of diabetic patients who develop renal failure. Furthermore, the severe hypoglycemia which occasionally occurs in elderly subjects with uremia following the administration of oral sulfonylureas may be partly due to this mechanism.


SUMMARY Avian hosts constitute a natural reservoir for thermophilic Campylobacter species, primarily Campylobacter jejuni and Campylobacter coli, and poultry flocks are frequently colonized in the intestinal tract with high numbers of the organisms. Prevalence rates in poultry, especially in slaughter-age broiler flocks, could reach as high as 100% on some farms. Despite the extensive colonization, Campylobacter is essentially a commensal in birds, although limited evidence has implicated the organism as a poultry pathogen. Although Campylobacter is insignificant for poultry health, it is a leading cause of food-borne gastroenteritis in humans worldwide, and contaminated poultry meat is recognized as the main source for human exposure. Therefore, considerable research efforts have been devoted to the development of interventions to diminish Campylobacter contamination in poultry, with the intention to reduce the burden of food-borne illnesses. During the past decade, significant advance has been made in understanding Campylobacter in poultry. This review summarizes the current knowledge with an emphasis on ecology, antibiotic resistance, and potential pre- and postharvest interventions.


It is well known that urban expansion is constrained in the UK by Green Belts around the major cities and by other policies. This policy of constraint came into existence after World War Two. The primary driving force at that time was a desire to preserve agricultural land which was perceived to be vital to the nation after the submarine blockade of the war years. This perceived need for agricultural production meant, firstly, that farming was left uncontrolled by the 1947 Planning Act, and, secondly, that it was heavily subsidised, subsidies which continued after the UK joined the EU in the seventies.Things changed around 1980, however. Firstly it was perceived that the drive for increased agricultural production was leading to the loss of some perceived benefits of the countryside as fields were enlarged, hedges removed, ponds drained, etc, and, secondly, that the use of pesticides and herbicides to increase production was leading to a loss of wildlife. Complaints about agricultural surpluses - butter mountains, milk lakes, etc, which led to land being set aside to reduce production meant that there seemed to be no reason to protect agricultural land.The reasons for the policy of constraint changed, however, but not the policy. The perceived need now was to protect the beauty, peace, and wildlife of the countryside.The policy continued to be supported because the British population believes various myths - that half or less of England is rural (not the ninety per cent of reality), or that the UK uses its urban land wastefully (actually it's more efficient than almost all other west European countries).The policies are also supported by the wealthy and powerful. Anyone walking in the London Green Belt will find that the land is mostly used, not for agriculture, but for golf courses and for stabling the horses of the rich.The economic consequences of the policy did not change, of course. These are that land and house prices are high and rising, the latter doubling in real terms every twenty five years, but this too is seen as a benefit by the older population who are home owners.But now the young, excluded from buying homes by the current economic crisis, are taking an active interest. Changes in policy appear to be possible and may take place.We wait with interest.


There has been an explosion in the number of wireless subscribers. A number of air interface technologies, such as GSM, TDMA and CDMA, are available to wireless service providers for offering wireless services. In addition, a variety of networking technologies, such as STM, ATM and frame relay, are available to the wireless services provider for designing their infrastructure networks. The abundant choice of technologies, and their associated capabilities and costs, creates a need for network design tools which can help vendors and wireless service providers to understand the economics of investing in different technologies. This article is concerned with the design of narrowband and broadband infrastructure networks for wireless access. The article first describes the different technology alternatives and tariff structures and their impact on wireless infrastructure network design. The general infrastructure design problem is then stated and a solution methodology outlined. Examples of the economic trade-offs involved in narrowband and broadband networking technologies are also presented.


By early 1990, researchers had changed the management of dental caries from the traditional surgical approach to a biological or medical approach. In modern operative dentistry, caries is managed as an infectious disease, and the focus is on maximum preservation of tooth structures (1). Minimal intervention dentistry (MID) is a new and important concept that should be considered for military personnel.

The philosophy of MID previously called minimally invasive dentistry was referred to prepare the smaller and more conservative cavities. The goal of MID is to keep teeth healthy and functional for entire life. The oral healthcare professionals must consider both individualized and population-based strategies for improving oral health. MID scopes are treatment objectives using the least invasive surgical approach with the minimal elimination of healthy tissues. However, today, the concept is much broader and includes treatment related to risk assessment of patients, the early discovery of oral diseases, directed preventively orientated policies and limited surgical intervention proper for the level of disease.

This concept, therefore, is not only limited to the management of dental caries but is also appropriate for other areas of oral health such as periodontology, oral rehabilitation and oral surgery and also endodontics. Scaling and root planning instead of severe periodontal surgeries, microsurgical endodontic techniques, tunneling technique for the removal of pulp horns during access cavity preparation in anterior teeth are some examples of MID.

MID principles do not consider the dental caries as only an infectious disease but instead a behavioral disease with a bacterial component. For practical incorporation of these principles into routine dental practice, the profession and the patients will need education in the new model. In many places, in our treatment methods, we still think about "extension for prevention" (2).

The fluoridation of water, using new technologies like laser beam for caries removal, laser caries detection systems, caries indicator dyes, adhesive materials and adhesive systems, ozone gas, resin infiltration combined with fluoride varnish application, pit and fissure sealants and fluoride varnish application are all necessary for successful MID. But controlling the behaviors, i.e. intake and frequency of fermentable sugars and carbohydrates, to not more than five times daily and removing dental plaque or dental biofilm from all tooth surfaces by brushing and using an effective fluoridated toothpaste twice daily can increase the chance for successful MID (1, 2).

Nutrition control, in terms of the consumption of fermentable sugars; using xylitol, sorbitol and the sugar-free products; incorporating casein phosphopeptide-amorphous calcium phosphate agents in chewing gum or in prophylactic pastes with or without fluoride are still important factors in managing caries development (2).

An overview of factors affecting the health shows that, most problems are related to the way people live and their origin is behavioral. All of these behaviors are obtained in the life environment and ministry and then are reinforced. Unfortunately, oral health is usually neglected more than the other parts of the public health.

In the armed forces with convenient access to dental insurance services, some factors such as low levels of knowledge and attitudes about the adverse effects of oral diseases on body health and its risk factors; low public perception for regular dental care and referrals to dentists and on the other hand, employment status (presence in remote areas); and also social and economic issues; are considered the serious obstacles to the improvement of oral health in this population.

With scientific regulation and reasonable planning, dramatic success can be achieved in the prevention of oral diseases with spending far less cost. In particular, with the proper implementation of preventive health care programs, the significant results can be expected because the personnel of our armed forces are fully accessible.

Undoubtedly, the first step is to collect information about health and health care systems in this field. In any organization, this information is essential as a key tool. These can determine the current status and our needs.

The next major step is to influence the attitudes and beliefs of the aimed society in order to solve the problems of their own oral health.

For the successful MID in the army, the army staff, duty military personnel and their families should be taught how to brush, floss and use mouthwashes and fluoride rinse. The etiology of dental caries, and also the worth of prevention through nutritional and oral hygiene measures should be explained to that population. Therefore, we should primarily pay attention to the control of the caries, dental plaque and calculus formation, and reduction in carbohydrate intake of the army population. These need to organize dentists and oral hygienists for teaching and screening the population about their oral health.

An individual at no time is free from dental caries or oral disease. The "whole population" approach is suitable for the prevention of oral and dental diseases and applying it is the only way to decrease the burden of these diseases and the cost of oral care (2). For this purpose, the medical services health insurance of the armed forces can do this better than other organizations.

At the end, if MID is to make an effect in supporting the purpose of 'teeth for life' for military staff and their families, it must be included in the dental curriculum. The concepts and objectives of MID should be taught to the dental students of the AJA University of Medical Sciences. Also, the researchers must target toward the MID in the army.


An Investigation of Factors that Affect the Efficiency of Limiting Amino Acid Utilization by Rainbow Trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) Afshin Gholami Advisor: University of Guelph, 2015 Professor DP Bureau Corn gluten meal (CGM) is a high protein ingredient commonly used in fish feeds. However, studies suggest that diets containing high levels of CGM elicit lower voluntary feed intake, growth and lower efficiency of utilization of limiting amino acid (AA) compared to other protein sources. It has been hypothesized that the AA profile of CGM (low lysine, excess leucine) could be responsible for these effects or protein from CGM could be digested faster than other protein sources, resulting in faster absorption and less efficient utilization of its AAs. A series of studies were conducted to examine the effect of feeding CGM on growth, efficiency of lysine utilization and the dynamics of protein digestion in rainbow trout. Results of growth trial indicated that weight gain, FE and nitrogen retention efficiency were significantly lower in fish fed CGM-based diets compared to those fed WGM based diets. Digestibility trial results revealed lower apparent digestibility of crude protein in CGM-based diets compared to that of WGM-based diets. The efficiency of digestible lysine utilization did not differ between the CGM and WGM-based diets. Serial digesta sampling of the gastrointestinal (GI) tract of rainbow trout and blood sampling were carried out to estimate digesta transit time and plasma AA concentrations. Results indicate that CGM-based diets passed through the GI tract four times faster than WGM-based diets. The ratios of plasma leucine to branched-chain amino acids, and leucine to lysine, were generally higher, for fish fed CGM-based diets compared to those fed WGM-based diets. To examine the impact of the excess leucine on growth performance and efficiency of AA utilization, rainbow trout were pair-fed CGM or WGM-based diets formulated to be deficient in lysine and contain adequate and excess leucine levels. Results indicated that excess leucine did not affect growth and efficiency of lysine utilization. The results from this thesis suggest that the lower digestibility of protein and AAs of CGM may in part explain the lower performance of CGM-based diet compared to other protein sources in some studies. Differences in the dynamics of digestion and absorption of AAs and their appearance in the circulation are evident. Therefore, it should be examined further in future studies.


There is little evidence for maternal immunological recognition of pregnancy in most species with the striking exception of the members of the genus Equus. Almost all mares make strong cytotoxic antibody responses to paternally inherited fetal antigens by Day 60 of gestation. Most of these responses are directed against antigens of the Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC), which constitutes the primary immunogenetic barrier to successful organ transplantation. The source of fetal MHC antigens in the pregnant mare appears to be the specialized trophoblast cells of the chorionic girdle region of the developing placenta. These cells invade the endometrium between Days 36 and 38 after ovulation to form the endometrial cups. The progenitor girdle cells express high levels of paternal MHC antigens, while the non-invasive trophoblast cells of the allantochorion and the differentiated trophoblast cells in the mature endometrial cups do not. This expression of MHC antigens by the chorionic girdle cells is unusual for a trophoblast tissue, and differs from most forms of trophoblast studied in other species. The maternal anti-fetal antibody responses of equine pregnancy do not adversely affect fetal development, nor are they required for successful pregnancy. However, it is possible that fetal loss of an immunological nature could occur in rare cases when the immunoregulatory mechanisms of pregnancy break down.


Linear latent variable models such as statistical factor analysis (SFA) and probabilistic principal component analysis (PPCA) assume that the data are distributed according to a multivariate Gaussian. A drawback of this assumption is that parameter learning in these models is sensitive to outliers in the training data. Approaches that rely on M-estimation have been introduced to render principal component analysis (PCA) more robust to outliers. M-estimation approaches assume the data are distributed according to a density with heavier tails than a Gaussian. Yet, these methods are limited in that they fail to define a probability model for the data. Data cannot be generated from these models, and the normalized probability of new data cannot evaluated. To address these limitations, we describe a generative probability model that accounts for outliers. The model is a linear latent variable model in which the marginal density over the data is a multivariate t, a distribution with heavier tails than a Gaussian. We present a computationally efficient expectation maximization (EM) algorithm for estimating the model parameters, and compare our approach with that of PPCA on both synthetic and real data sets.


Light pulses have found increasing use in medicine and biology. Biological tissues, however, scatter light very strongly, and the modeling of light pulse propagation in biological tissues has not been established because of scattering. We compare the results of three modeling methods, the photon diffusion approximation, the diffusive wave approximation, and the two-flux method with those of the discrete ordinate method which provides the exact solution of the transient equation of radiative transfer for the case of 1 picosecond pulse incidence on scattering and absorbing slab or semi-infinite media simulating biological tissues. The early behavior of the light pulses predicted by the photon diffusion approximation is quite different from that by the diffusive wave approximation. In the later period both the photon diffusion and diffusive wave approximations are able to give reasonable results, but the two-flux method is not. Because of much shorter computation time, the diffusive wave approximation is advantageous to the photon diffusion approximation.


Abstract:Legal status is a growing dimension of inequality among immigrants in the U.S. Scholars have suggested that the legal status with which immigrants enter the country stratifies their short- and long-term opportunities for labor market integration. However, much quantitative immigration scholarship modeling the relationship between legal status and labor market integration treats legal status as static. In reality, immigrants change statuses dynamically throughout their lives. This article uses a dynamic conceptualization of legal status, as well as nationally representative data and regression and propensity score weighting techniques, to examine whether five initial legal statuses are associated with divergent labor market trajectories even after those statuses change. I find that initial legal statuses—which I refer to as starting points—are associated with ordered differences in immigrants' occupational positions immediately after immigrants change status to lawful permanent residence. These differences persist over time. Five years after all immigrants share lawful permanent residence, employment visa holders maintain more prestigious jobs; immigrants with family reunification and diversity status are in the middle; and immigrants with refugee status and undocumented experience have less prestigious jobs. This article demonstrates aggregate, longitudinal patterns of stratification among a nationally representative sample of permanent residents. The findings suggest the importance of modeling legal status as a dynamic rather than static category to reflect the continued influence of legal status starting points on immigrants' labor market integration.


The problem of anonymous wireless networking is considered when an adversary is capable of controlling a subset of routes in the network. For a desired quality-of-service (QoS), as measured by network throughput, the problem of maximizing anonymity is studied from a game-theoretic perspective. Anonymity is quantified using conditional entropy of the routes given the adversary's observation. The problem of optimizing anonymity is posed as a two player zero-sum game between the network designer and the adversary; the task of the adversary is to choose a subset of flows to control so that anonymity of routes is minimum whereas the task of the network designer is to maximize anonymity by choosing a subset of nodes to evade flow detection by generating independent transmission schedules. It is shown that a unique Nash equilibrium exists for the game in the class of randomized strategies. The Nash equilibrium conditions are then used to derive properties of the optimal strategies of the network designer and the adversary.


This paper reports on a project aimed at revitalizing small and old rural villages through establishing a network of bookshops, the BookTownNet. The project combined a research framework based on theories from information system research and regional economics in analyzing the development and diffusion of information and communication technology (ICT) to small, rural enterprises through that network. Our findings indicate that use of the Internet both locally and between the booktowns has strengthened the communication and collaboration between them, thus creating a better basis for the small bookshops to be competitive in the information society. Further, we have found that differences in local innovation systems to some extent have influenced the diffusion processes. Our data also show that the booktown network has been able to compensate for the lack of support in the regional innovation system, which makes the importance of the ICT-based virtual network spanning geographically distributed regions evident. This indicates that the booktown infrastructure and support system has been the most important factor in the bookshops' ability to implement and use the new technical solutions.


The PIRAT Global Scales (Broughton, Hommel & the Parent-Infant Project, 2016) have been manualised to provide a global assessment of the infant-parent and parent-infant relationship up to the age of 2 years. They offer a shared language and understanding among health professionals from various disciplines as to what constitutes risk and resilience. Preliminary research into inter-rater reliability showed that PIRAT Global Scales provide a reliable assessment of the overall relational quality and can be used as a screening tool to identify infants at risk (Hommel, Broughton, & Target, 2014, 2015, 2016). The study evaluates PIRAT Global Scales' psychometric properties based on the standardised 3.5 day reliability training. Further research evaluates PIRAT Global Scales' reliability and validity on a larger sample of mother-infant dyads. The PIRAT Global Scales reliability and validity study uses data from a Parent-Infant Psychotherapy Randomized Controlled Trial. The research establishes PIRAT Global Scales' reliability, in particular internal consistency and inter-rater reliability. Furthermore, the study establishes PIRAT Global Scales' validity compared to a number of widely used, well-validated measures of parent-infant interaction, such as the Emotional Availability Scales (EAS; Biringen, 2000), the Coding Interactive Behavior (CIB; Feldman, 1998) and the CARE-Index (Crittenden, 2001) and indicators of risk, such as 'Disorganized Attachment' (Main & Solomon, 1986, 1990), low 'Reflective functioning on the Parent Development Interview' (PDI-R; Slade, Aber, Berger, Bresgi, & Kaplan, 2003) and high 'Parental Stress' assessed by the Parenting Stress Index – Short Form (PSI-SF; Abidin, 1995). PIRAT Global Scales are shown to be reliable and valid, and therefore enable the user to set their observations within a reliable and validated assessment framework of the parent-infant relationship. Implications of the research findings for the clinical use of PIRAT Global Scales in a variety of clinical settings and for future research will be discussed.


Fiscal adjustment was a particular important experience for the countries members of the European Union the 1990s as they prepared for the Maastricht criteria to enter the EMU. For the transition countries the effort seems to be double. This paper addresses the fiscal adjustment in Hungary trying to find if there was any episode of successful fiscal adjustment in the past 13 years. There are also identified the factors that hamper or, on the contrary, favor accomplishing a successful fiscal adjustment in Hungary. The paper brings something new in that it traces the fiscal consolidation performance only for one country, thus allowing detecting the policies that were unsuccessful in bringing a successful and lasting fiscal adjustment in Hungary. In conclusion, the basic ideas of the 2002 Pre-accession Program, respectively, the introduction of three-year rolling expenditure ceilings to serve as a basis for medium-term budget planning and the movement towards performance-based budgeting, can provide an answer to the problem of the political fiscal cycle, but only to the extent to which constituencies in Hungary decide what the appropriate level of public spending is and how to achieve it. (*Paper prepared by the author on the occasion of a visiting fellowship at the Institute for World Economics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences (24 May- 11 June 2004). The author would like to thank Professor Jacek Rostowski, Professor Laszlo Halpern, Professor Dezseri Kalman and Professor Peter Benczur for their comments and guidance regarding the fiscal policy in Hungary. Also, the author appreciates the opinions expressed by Mr. Donat Magyari (Cabinet of the Prime Minister). The author is also thankful to the Institute of World Economics for the opportunity to do this research and specifically to Mrs Eva Nagy, Mr Tamas Szemler and Mr Meisel Sandor for professional advises and logistic support).


In the first years of the 21st century Earth was being influenced by forces greater than
our own and yet as vulnerable. With infinite complacency men and women went to and
fro over this globe about their affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over
matter. And yet, across the vastness of time Earth viewed the actions of people with
increasing despair. And slowly, but surely, she drew her plans against us…..
We have borrowed these words, with some poetic licence, from H.G. Wells' late
Victorian science fiction spectacular The War of Worlds. Wells' carefully crafted opening
salvo to his novel contains words prescient in the early 21st century as we face the
prospect of rapid change to our climate, and warns us about complacency in the belief of
our dominion over nature. Already in the late 19th century many scientists were
commenting on the extent of human influence on planet Earth. The Italian geologist
Antonio Stoppani (1873) was perhaps the first to moot these ideas. Later, as the 19th
century drew to a close the Swede Arrhenius and the American Chamberlain worked out
the relationship between the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and global warming.
Arrhenius suggested that future generations of humans would need to raise surface
temperatures to provide new areas of agricultural land and thus feed a growing
population. But he could not have conceived of the massive rate of human population
increase in the 20th century. In 2002 the Nobel Prize winning scientist Paul Crutzen
resurrected the concept of the Anthropocene to denote the ever increasing influence of
humans on Earth. The word has now entered the scientific literature as a vivid expression
of the degree of environmental change on planet Earth caused by humans (Zalasiewicz et
al. 2008 and references therein).
For the Anthropocene to become useful though, it needs some quantification.
How might an Anthropocene Epoch be unique relative to the Holocene or the Pleistocene epochs that preceded it? What criteria could we use to quantify when the Anthropocene
began, and how might future generations of geologists recognise its signal in the rock
record? More importantly though, does the term Anthropocene help us to understand the
influence of humans on our world and how that affects the environment of the near
future?


This paper describes a small-scale piece of research using concept mapping to elicit A level students' understandings of particle physics. Fifty-nine year 12 (16- and 17 year-old) students from two London schools participated. The exercise took place during school physics lessons. Students were instructed how to make a concept map and were provided with 24 topic-specific key words. Students' concept maps were analysed by identifying the knowledge propositions they represented, enumerating how many students had made each one, and by identifying errors and potential misconceptions, with reference to the specification they were studying. The only correct statement made by a majority of students in both schools was that annihilation takes place when matter and antimatter collide, although there was evidence that some students were unable to distinguish between annihilation and pair production. A high proportion of students knew of up, down and strange quarks, and that the electron is a lepton. However, some students appeared to have a misconception that everything is made of quarks. Students found it harder to classify tau particles than they did electrons and muons. Where students made incorrect links about muons and tau particles their concept maps suggested that they thought they were mesons or quarks.


Haystack Observatory is a multidisciplinary research center located in Westford, MA, 40 miles northwest of the MIT campus. The observatory conducts astronomical studies using radio techniques, geodetic measurements using very long baseline interferometry (VLBI), and atmospheric observations using high-power incoherent sca�er radar. An important component of Haystack's mission is the education of undergraduate and graduate students through research opportunities using the observatory's facilities.


Symmetries and conservation laws of energy, linear momentum, and angular momentum play a central role in nonlinear optics. Recently, paraxial light fields with nontrivial topology have been attracting a keen interest. Despite not being eigenstates of the orbital and spin angular momenta (OAM and SAM), they are eigenstates of the generalized angular momentum (GAM) operator—a mixture of the OAM and SAM operators with fractional eigenvalues. By driving high harmonic generation with a polarization Möbius strip carrying a half-integer GAM charge and implementing angular momentum characterization methods in the extreme ultraviolet range, we demonstrate the linear scaling of the GAM with the harmonic order, each harmonic carrying a precise half-integer GAM charge. Our work shows that beyond SAM and OAM, the GAM is, in some situations, an appropriate quantum number. It paves the way for finer manipulations and applications of light beams containing fractional-order polarization singularities.


Courses Biological Mathematics (BIOM) BIOM 300 Modeling Techniques in Biology Units: 3.00 Modeling will be presented in the context of biological examples drawn from ecology and evolution, including life history evolution, sexual selection, evolutionary epidemiology and medicine, and ecological interactions. Techniques will be drawn from dynamical systems, probability, optimization, and game theory with emphasis put on how to formulate and analyze models. LEARNING HOURS 120 (36L;84P) Requirements: Prerequisite (MATH 120 or MATH 121 or MATH 124) and (MATH 110 or MATH 111 or MATH 112). Offering Faculty: Faculty of Arts and Science


In The English and their History, the first full-length account to appear in one volume for many decades, Robert Tombs gives us the history of the English people, and of how the stories they have told about themselves have shaped them, from the prehistoric 'dreamtime' through to the present day. If a nation is a group of people with a sense of kinship, a political identity and representative institutions, then the English have a claim to be the oldest nation in the world. They first came into existence as an idea, before they had a common ruler and before the country they lived in even had a name. They have lasted as a recognizable entity ever since, and their defining national institutions can be traced back to the earliest years of their history. The English have come a long way from those precarious days of invasion and conquest, with many spectacular changes of fortune. Their political, economic and cultural contacts have left traces for good and ill across the world. This book describes their history and its meanings from their beginnings in the monasteries of Northumbria and the wetlands of Wessex to the cosmopolitan energy of today's England. Robert Tombs draws out important threads running through the story, including participatory government, language, law, religion, the land and the sea, and ever-changing relations with other peoples. Not the least of these connections are the ways the English have understood their own history, have argued about it, forgotten it, and yet been shaped by it. These diverse and sometimes conflicting understandings are an inherent part of their identity. Rather to their surprise, as ties within the United Kingdom loosen, the English are suddenly beginning a new period in their long history. Especially at times of change, history can help us to think about the sort of people we are and wish to be. This book, the first single-volume work on this scale for more than half a century, and which incorporates a wealth of recent scholarship, presents a challenging modern account of this immense and continuing story, bringing out the strength and resilience of English government, the deep patterns of division, and yet also the persistent capacity to come together in the face of danger. Robert Tombs is Professor of French History at Cambridge University and a Fellow of St John's College. His book That Sweet Enemy: the French and the British from the Sun King to the Present, co-written with his wife Isabelle, was published in 2006.


AIM: The study objective was to cross-sectionally examine the relationships among leisure-time, household, and occupational physical activity with physical functions in Japanese older adults. METHODS: We randomly enrolled 189 community-dwelling older adults, aged 65 to 85 years, as subjects from the Basic Resident Register of Kasama City, Ibaraki prefecture. Physical activity was assessed by the Physical Activity Scale for the Elderly. Analysis of covariance was performed to determine the relationships between physical activity and physical functions, after adjustment for age and sex.

RESULTS: Leisure-time physical activity significantly correlated with one-leg balance with eyes open, sit and reach, timed standing test from along sitting position on the floor, functional reach, 5-repetition sit-to-stand, timed up and go, 5-m habitual walk, choice stepping reaction time, and power in sit-to-stand tests. Household physical activity was significantly related to 5-repetition sit-to-stand and ability in sit-to-stand. Total (leisure-time plus household plus occupational) activity was significantly correlated with one-leg balance with eyes open, functional reach, and power in sit-to-stand tests. Post-hoc testing indicated that the levels of physical functions were higher in the subjects of the third tertile than in those of the first or second tertile. No difference was found in physical functions between the first and second tertile.

CONCLUSION: Leisure-time physical activity was related to many physical functions. Household physical activity was also related to lower-extremity functions. Our data suggest that medium- or high-level physical activity may be necessary for older adults to maintain their physical functions.


Epstein‐Barr virus (EBV) is a causative agent of infectious mononucleosis and several malignancies involving lymphocytes and epithelial cells. We recently reported genomic analyses of chronic active EBV infection (CAEBV), a proliferative disorder of T and/or NK cells, as well as other lymphoid malignancies. We found that T and/or NK cells undergoing clonal expansion in CAEBV patients gain somatic driver mutations as the disorder progresses. Investigation of the viral genome revealed viral genomes harboring intragenic deletions in the BamHI‐rightward transcripts (BART) region and in essential lytic genes. Interestingly, we observed that these deletions resulted in leaky expression of viral lytic genes. This increased expression of viral lytic genes is reminiscent of the "pre‐latent abortive lytic" state, in which a substantial number of lytic genes are produced for weeks in the absence of progeny production, which contributes to cell survival upon de novo infection. It has been known that EBV can choose either latent or lytic state, but this dualistic concept may need to be reconsidered, as our data suggest the presence of the third, intermediate state; leaky expression of lytic genes that does not lead to completion of the full lytic amplification cycle. Leaky expression of lytic genes likely contributes to the formation and maintenance of several types of EBV‐associated tumors. We also presented significant circumstantial evidence suggesting that EBV infects lymphoid progenitor cells in CAEBV before differentiation into T and NK cells. Taken together, our new data shed light on oncogenesis of CAEBV and other EBV‐associated malignancies.


This paper makes a speciality of the method of finding a shifting item over time the use of a digicam.The objective of video monitoring is to companion goal items in consecutive video frames.The affiliation can be specifically hard while the objects are moving speedy and tracked object adjustments its orientation over the years .The particle filtering technique with more than one cues consisting of coloration, texture and edges as commentary capabilities is a powerful approach for tracking deformable gadgets in photo sequences with complex backgrounds. The proposed shape is designed to tune multiple objects the use of particle filter out and avoids the use of hybrid kingdom estimation for the estimation of wide variety of active gadgets and its associated state vectors as proposed in [2]. A hardware-friendly tracking framework has been installed and implemented on area-programmable gate array (FPGA). The algorithm is capable of cope with partial occlusions and to recover the tracks after temporary loss. Key Phrases—object monitoring, particle filter, FPGA, partial occlusions, security tracking.


The existing literature does not provide adequate guidance on the diagnosis and management of patients with non-specific terminal ileitis, while the data regarding the percentage of patients that finally develop Crohn's disease are scarce.

 The aim of this study was to evaluate the prevalence and natural course of non-specific terminal ileitis in patients who underwent colonoscopy in our department during the last decade. All patients with endoscopic findings of terminal ileitis and non-specific histological findings between 2008 and 2018 were included in the study. Patient characteristics, initial symptoms, biopsy findings, and the patients' clinical and endoscopic course were recorded. Patients with a history of Crohn's disease or histological findings related to specific diseases were excluded.

 Out of 5.353 colonoscopies in total, 92 patients (mean age: 50 years, men: 56.5%, asymptomatic: 72.5%) with non-specific terminal ileitis were identified (prevalence: 1.7%). Among 92 patients, 56 (61%) had available follow-up information for at least 6 months after initial endoscopy. In these patients, the reasons for performing endoscopy were chronic diarrhea (21/56, 37.5%), screening (16/56, 28.6%), abdominal pain (12/56, 21.4%), iron deficiency (5/56, 9%) and visible blood in stool (2/56, 3.5%). Endoscopic findings included erosions/ulcerations (62.5%), mucosal edema (23.2%), mucosal erythema (10.7%) and ileal valve stenosis (3.6%). Among 56 patients, 16 (28.6%) received medical treatment that included aminosalicylates (25%), budesonide (62.5%) and antibiotics (12.5%). Recession of symptoms was recorded in 20 out of 40 symptomatic patients (50%). Interestingly, symptomatic relief was more frequent in patients who did not receive any treatment (75%) comparing to those who received medications (26.3%), (p=0.02). In total, 23/56 (41%) patients underwent 2nd endoscopy with persisting endoscopic findings in 15/23 (65.2%). Eleven out of 56 (19.6%) patients were eventually diagnosed with Crohn's disease. The probability of Crohn's disease diagnosis was significantly higher in symptomatic patients (27.5%) comparing to asymptomatic (0%) (p=0.019). The majority of patients with Crohn's disease (9/11, 81.8%) remained symptomatic after initial endoscopy (p= 0.002), while 90% of them had persisting endoscopic findings in follow-up endoscopy (p=0.019).

 Non-specific terminal ileitis has a generally benign clinical course regardless of the administered treatment. However, patients with persisting symptoms and endoscopic findings should be followed closely to monitor later development of Crohn's disease.


Kortnameh is an epic composed in Masnavi format. Modeled on Ferdowsi's Shahnameh, the work was composed by Rabiee Pushangi (671-702A.H.) at the behest of Fakhruddin-e Kort (697-706 A.H.) about the history of Kort dynasty. The work has disappeared and little is known about it. Tarikhname-ye Herat (721 A.H.) is the only source that has preserved a little more than 250 verses of Kortnameh, providing us with some information about the author and his style. To identify the structure and format of Kortnameh, the present study has tried to explore and analyze the surviving verses of the work in Tarikhname-ye Herat.


Kari Myöhänen Modelling of combustion and sorbent reactions in three-dimensional flow environment of a circulating fluidized bed furnace Lappeenranta 2011 161 pages Acta Universitatis Lappeenrantaensis 449 Diss. Lappeenranta University of Technology ISBN 978-952-265-160-0, ISBN 978-952-265161-7 (PDF), ISSN 1456-4491 This thesis presents a three-dimensional, semi-empirical, steady state model for simulating the combustion, gasification, and formation of emissions in circulating fluidized bed (CFB) processes. In a large-scale CFB furnace, the local feeding of fuel, air, and other input materials, as well as the limited mixing rate of different reactants produce inhomogeneous process conditions. To simulate the real conditions, the furnace should be modelled threedimensionally or the three-dimensional effects should be taken into account. The only available methods for simulating the large CFB furnaces three-dimensionally are semiempirical models, which apply a relatively coarse calculation mesh and a combination of fundamental conservation equations, theoretical models and empirical correlations. The number of such models is extremely small. The main objective of this work was to achieve a model which can be applied to calculating industrial scale CFB boilers and which can simulate all the essential subphenomena: fluid dynamics, reactions, the attrition of particles, and heat transfer. The core of the work was to develop the model frame and the required sub-models for determining the combustion and sorbent reactions. The objective was reached, and the developed model was successfully used for studying various industrial scale CFB boilers combusting different types of fuel. The model for sorbent reactions, which includes the main reactions for calcitic limestones, was applied for studying the new possible phenomena occurring in the oxygen-fired combustion. The presented combustion and sorbent models and principles can be utilized in other model approaches as well, including other empirical and semi-empirical model approaches, and CFD based simulations. The main achievement is the overall model frame which can be utilized for the further development and testing of new sub-models and theories, and for concentrating the knowledge gathered from the experimental work carried out at bench scale, pilot scale and industrial scale apparatus, and from the computational work performed by other modelling methods.


In this article I apply the concept of the urban soundscape as developed by Long and Collins (2012) in an analysis of the impact musicians from Hull had on the evolution of David Bowie's seminal 1972 work The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. I argue that the performance of Ziggy Stardust, both on record and on stage, is doubly coded in relation to place and space. The 'concept' of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust as a musical, a fictional story with songs performed on stage, and an accompanying album of recorded songs, initially appears to be heavily associated with London. The format of the concept – which the creator described as theatre, rather than a rock and roll show – is derived from Bowie's experience growing up in London from the late 1940s to the early 1970s, a time of great change in the capital. I suggest that the Ziggy Stardust performance, and its significance, rests on the authenticity of the supporting musicians in the project, musicians from Hull, Yorkshire, with whom Bowie had been playing for more than two years before it was aired. I illustrate that Bowie and his support cast were subject to different cultural settings, and thus influenced by different soundscapes, and the relevant properties from each are compared here. I go on to provide some assessment of how the involvement of these Hull musicians in the Bowie project has impacted upon the city's historical music culture, and on heritage issues and cultural production in that town. I conclude by noting that Hull has a thriving arts community and is UK Capital of Culture in 2017.


The form of resonance line-shapes unveils information about its nonperturbative properties and formation mechanisms. Here, we study the non-Breit–Wigner energy distribution of the resonance ψ(3770) using an unitarized effective Lagrangian approach that includes the effect of the nearby threshold D+D−. Two poles are found in the second Riemann sheet near the resonance amplitude. We discuss the setting of the free parameters and possible effects contributing to the signal.


Emissivity is a critical parameter in the rapid thermal processing ~RTP! of semiconductors for temperature control and thermal modeling. It is often considered as a material property that depends on the sample temperature and surface finishing. For a silicon wafer placed in a radiation environment such as a RTP chamber, however, the ambient photons emitted from lamps create electron-hole pairs in the wafer. These electrons and holes participate in the thermal emission from the wafer and change its radiative properties. This work studies this photon effect on the radiative properties of silicon and demonstrates, through modeling and experiment, that radiative properties of a silicon wafer may depend on the temperature of the lamps due to free-carrier excitation. Such an photon effect imposes a limit on the accuracy of temperature measurement by the infrared pyrometry method in a RTP environment. It is also an important factor to consider in the measurement of the temperature dependence of silicon's optical properties and in the thermal modeling of the RTP. ©1997 American Institute of Physics. @S0021-8979 ~97!03014-4#


Ventilation network graph has an important place in the management of a coal mine. In that case, aesthetics plays a major role for generating readable and understandable layouts. Besides, the drawing is required to be oval. The traditional longest path method for drawing ventilation network graph is inefficient and cannot effectively reduce the number of arc crossings because of the geometric intersection method. In this paper, we developed a new approach to draw ventilation network graph, consist of Sugiyama method framework, the longest path method and GA-SA algorithm. The longest path method was employed to rank nodes, and long arcs were removed by solving integer programming problem to minimize the sum length of ventilation network. Then genetic algorithm and simulated annealing algorithm were adopted to optimize the node order on reducing the number of arc crossings. In order to make the drawing be oval, a modified version of the longest path method was made to calculate node coordinates and arc shapes, which is called the longest parallel path method. Finally, computational experiments were carried out on two test ventilation network with our new approach.


In this paper we present a new evolutionary framework for 3-SAT. This method can be divided into three stages, where each stage is an evolutionary algorithm. The first stage improves the quality of the initial population. The second stage improves the speed of the algorithm periodically generating new solutions. The 3rd stage is a hybrid evolutionary algorithm, which improves the solutions with a local search. The key points of our algorithm are the evolutionary framework and the mutation operation that form a concatenated, complex neighborhood structure, "a variable neighborhood descent". We tested our algorithm on some benchmark problems. Comparing the results with other heuristic methods, we can conclude that our algorithm belongs to the best methods of this problem scope.


Objective: To evaluate the yield and structural characteristics of sorghum fodder, as well as the chemical quality of the fodder and the silage with and without fertilization. Design/Methodology/Approach: The evaluated variables were, in the fodder: dry matter yield (DMY, kg ha), leaf:stalk ratio (L:S, g g), plant height (H, cm) and intercepted radiation (IR, %); and in the silage: dry matter (DM, %) crude protein (CP, %), neutral detergent fiber (NDF, %), acid detergent fiber (ADF, %), lactic acid (LA, %) and pH. There were two treatments, with fertilization and without fertilization. Results: The agronomic characteristics L:S, H and IR improved with fertilization (P0.05). The DMY with fertilization was 7060 kg DM ha and without fertilization, it was 5472 kg DM ha. The values of DM, CP, NDF, ADF and LA of the silage with fertilization were 33.60, 7.83, 51.06, 28.51 and 4.51%, respectively, and the pH was 4.3, and without fertilization these values were 47.67, 5.83, 43.36, 25.21 and 2.86%, respectively, and the pH was 4.66; all values were different when comparing with and without fertilization (P0.05). Study Limitations/Implications: These quality parameters should continue to be studied in sorghum silages and with different fertilization doses to expand the decision outlook. Findings/Conclusions: According to the results obtained, it is concluded that the sorghum fodder crop should be fertilized for the ensilage, since higher dry matter yield, better agronomic, and nutritional characteristics are obtained.


The amount of heat flowing from the earth is a quantity of considerable geophysical importance. For some years there has been speculation about the possible consequences of the earth's crust warming up, on the assumption that the amount of heat generated by the radioactive content of the crust is greater than that flowing to the surface (Joly 1925). Although a number of different workers have made measurements of the radioactive content of rocks from various parts of the world (Jeffreys 1936), until the present time the heat flow received little attention. If the amount of heat flowing from the earth in unit time per unit area is denoted by H , then | H | = kp , (1) where k and p are the thermal conductivity and temperature gradient in the earth's crust respectively, and it is therefore apparent that two quantities must be measured before a value for H can be obtained. For a great many years experiments have been made to determine the thermal conductivity of rocks, and for a long time temperatures have been measured in wells, bore-holes and tunnels, but the writer knows of only two places, the Simplon Tunnel and the Lake Superior Copper Mining District, where both have been measured, and the values of the heat flow deduced from these data are rather uncertain (Anderson 1938; Ingersoll and Hotchkiss 1934; Peirce 1903). As the value of k for different rocks varies through a factor of twenty or more, and as p in one region may differ by a factor of six from that in another district (neglecting hot spring and volcanic areas), the practice of estimating the heat flow by taking ''average" values of p and k must lead to a very uncertain value of H . In the past, H has been taken by various writers at different times to lie anywhere between 3.45 x 10-6 and 1.6 x 10-6 cal./sq. cm.-sec., and it will be shown below and in a companion paper (Bullard 1939) that at least for Britain and South Africa even the second estimate is too high. It must be added that in general there are practical difficulties in the work. Temperatures measured in mines are often unreliable, and for various reasons there are not many "dry" bores in this country which have been left unplugged for a sufficiently long time for reliable temperature measurements to be made, and from which a well-preserved selection of representative rock samples is available of a nature suitable for making rock specimens for conductivity purposes.


This paper argues that Product-Service System Design for Sustainability applied to Distributed Renewable Energy DRE) is a promising approach to help achieve the goal of "Sustainable energy for all" (United Nation). Firstly, two understandings are presented: 1) Distributed Renewable Energy (DRE) is a key leverage for sustainable development and; 2) ProductService System (PSS) is a promising model for sustainable development. Based on those understandings two consequent research hypotheses are presented: 1) S.PSS is a promising model for DRE and is particularly relevant for the distributed and informal economies in lowmiddle income (all) contexts; 2) (Product-Service) System Design for Sustainable energy for all is a new challenging role for design. The recently awarded LeNSes (Learning Network on Sustainable energy system) EU project (bi-regional with Africa) is based on these hypotheses and it is introduced in terms of its aims and expected results, i.e. to deepen and diffuse the knowledge-base and know-how of system design for sustainable energy for all. Finally, two best practices of DRE-based S.PSS are described, one is the recently awarded (2014 International Ashden) project 'M-POWER Off-grid electric services in Arusha, Tanzania' and the second is the pilot implementation of the 'Sunride sustainable mobility system in Cape


Since fat accumulation takes place in many algae as a response to exhaustion of the nitrogen supply, it has been suggested that this may provide a means of enhancing the potential food value of algae. To test this possibility, chemostatic continuous cultures of Chlorella sorokiniana and Oocystis polymorpha were subjected to successive reductions in influent nitrogen. As cellular nitrogen content decreased from about 10 to 4%, oxygen evolution, carbon dioxide uptake, chlorophyll content, and tissue production were drastically reduced, but total lipid content was essentially unchanged. Caloric values and C, H, and N analyses suggested a moderate increase in carbohydrate content, but gas chromatographic analyses revealed no significant qualitative or quantitative changes in the fatty acid fraction. In batch-cultured cells, nitrogen could be reduced to 3% of dry weight, causing a concomitant increase in total fatty acids and pronounced changes in the composition of the fatty acid fraction. These results suggest that cellular nitrogen must fall to approximately 3% of dry weight before appreciable increases in lipid synthesis can occur. Cell nitrogen is then apparently completely bound in essential cell constituents, and carbon subsequently fixed is converted into lipid products. The findings indicate that nitrogen limitation may be useful in increasing the food quality of batch-cultured cells, but the technique has little value for continuous culture systems per se.


The interaction between trypomastigotes of T. cruzi and purified rat eosinophils, neutrophils and macrophages has been studied. Macrophages induced by dextran, became infected and the parasites multiplied as amastigotes, eventually being released as trypomastigotes into the medium. Eosinophils show an antibody-dependent phagocytosis, while neutrophil phagocytosis is enhanced by antibody. Electron microscopy showed that once inside the granulocyte phagosome, the trypomastigotes transform to amastigotes as a prelude to degeneration. This occurs as material apparently of granule origin accumulates in the phagosome. Eosinophils have the capacity to eject incompletely degenerated amastigotes into the medium. This phenomenon is discussed in relation to previous time-lapse cinematography studies of the lysis of chick erythrocytes by eosinophils, and reports that eosinophils release granule contents by means of a secretory vesicle.


The discipline of human-computer interaction has become a subject taught across universities around the world, outside of the cultures where it originated. However, the intercultural implication of its assimilation into the syllabus of courses offered by universities around the world remains under-researched. The purpose of this ongoing research project is to provide insights for these implications in terms of the student and teacher experience of HCI. In order to develop intercultural awareness of these questions universities from UK, India, Namibia, Mexico and China are collaborating in a multiple case study involving students and lecturers engaged in a common and evaluation and design tasks. Findings will then be used to propose an international HCI curriculum more supportive of local perspectives. This paper describes the initial steps of this study and some preliminary findings from Namibia, India, China and Mexico about cognitive styles and cultural attitudes.


This paper studies the role of stabilization policy in a model where firm entry responds to shocks and uncertainty. We evaluate stabilization policy in the context of a simple analytically solvable sticky price model, where firms have to prepay a fixed cost of entry. The presence of endogenous entry can alter the dynamic response to shocks, leading to greater persistence in the effects of monetary and real shocks. Entry affects welfare, depending on the love of variety in consumption and investment, as well as its implications for market competitiveness. In this context, monetary policy has an additional role in regulating the optimal number of entrants, as well as the optimal level of production at each firm. We find that the same monetary policy rule optimal for regulating the scale of production in familiar sticky price models without entry, also generates the amount of (endogenous) entry corresponding to a flex-price equilibrium.


We present a novel approach to perform instance segmentation and counting for densely packed self-similar trees using a top-view RGB image sequence. We propose a solution that leverages pixel content, shape, and self-occlusion. First, we perform an initial over-segmentation of the image sequence and aggregate structural characteristics into a contour graph with temporal information incorporated. Second, using a graph convolutional network and its inherent local messaging passing abilities, we merge adjacent tree crown patches into a final set of tree crowns. Per various studies and comparisons, our method is superior to all prior methods and results in high-accuracy instance segmentation and counting despite the trees being tightly packed. Finally, we provide various forest image sequence datasets suitable for subsequent benchmarking and evaluation captured at different altitudes and leaf conditions.


Background: Stress coping methods are used by the individuals to overcome daily stresses. It is important to maintain stress within limits for normal functioning and productivity of a human being. Medical students come across many stress factors during their medical training. Stress coping is divided into Adaptive and Non-adaptive coping, students using adaptive coping strategies (ACS) are considered to have positive coping methods and results in long term constructive outcomes i.e. improved self-esteem, stronger social bonds and wisdom, while students using non-adaptive coping strategies are at risk of mental health issues. Our objective was to evaluate stress coping methods among medical students of public and private medical colleges of district Peshawar. Methods: This study was a descriptive cross-sectional study. Data was collected using convenient sampling technique from 200 medical students of both Public and private sector of district Peshawar. Equal numbers of boys and girls were selected from age groups of 18-25 years. Demographic variable along with methods to cope stress were collected using validated pre-tested questionnaire called "Brief cope scale (BCS) of Urdu version by Akhtar (2005)". Standard cut off value of 56 was used to differentiate between students having adaptive or mal-adaptive coping styles. Data collected was analyzed using SPSS. Results: Students of public medical college scored M=71.78 with SD=8.955 while students of private medical colleges scored M=69.20 with SD 10.07. Conclusion: The findings of the study suggest that undergraduate students in medical collages have non-adaptive coping methods rather than adaptive ones. Female students used more adaptive coping skills than male students. Students in public sector had better coping skills than students of private medical colleges.


Combustion of fossil fuels produces millions of tons of air pollutants such as NOx and SO2. The high cost and operating difficulties of prevailing selective catalytic reduction (SCR) process are driving R&D efforts towards alternative technologies and modifications to the SCR technology. Non-thermal plasma technique has been found to be one of the most promising technologies for NOx removal. In the present study, a non-thermal plasma technique in the form of dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) has been extensively investigated for the removal of NOx. The main variables including electrical parameters, chemical compounds and flow conditions are identified and studied in terms of their effects on NO/NOx conversions. Significant increases in NO/NO x conversions of 90% and 40% are observed in the presence of both O 2 and H2O than in the presence of either O2 or H2O alone. Addition of 1000 ppm ethylene to the NO/O2/CO 2/N2 mixture almost promotes 100% NO oxidation to NO 2. The chemistry of plasma reactions is discussed. The DBD system is found to be effective for NO oxidization into NO2 and HNO 3. Kinetics studies have also been made for NO-O2 reaction under plasma conditions. A rate equation has been proposed, -d[NO]/dt = kp [NO]1/2[O2] 1/2 with kp = 0.0143exp(-1865/E d) showing that a reaction can be initiated at much lower activation energy under plasma conditions. A hybrid plasma-catalyst (P-C) system has been developed to achieve the synergy. gamma-Al2O3 and laboratory-prepared tungsten catalysts have been used in the hybrid P-C experiments. The improvement in NOx removal by the P-C system is about 15% compared to by the SCR alone when 1000--3000 ppm of methane or ethylene is added to the inlet gas stream. There is no formation of N2O (greenhouse gas) in the PC system when inlet gas contains moisture or ethylene. DBD reactor design parameters have also been investigated in terms of SO2 oxidation to SO3 with respect to reactor geometry, dielectric material and thickness. The DBD technique has the great potential to replace the prevailing combined SCR and flue gas disulfurization (FGD) processes both technically and economically. The P-C system has the potential to be used for the removal of NOx from diesel engine exhausts.


BACKGROUND
Suction drains are commonly placed after rhytidectomy surgery to avoid seroma formation that may result from dead spaces between skin layers. Fibrin sealants promote tissue adherence by cross-linking with extracellular matrix proteins, which may reduce the dead space under skin flaps.

OBJECTIVES
The authors evaluate the safety and preliminary efficacy of the fibrin sealant (FS) VH S/D 4 s-apr (ARTISS; Baxter Healthcare Corp, Deerfield, Illinois), added to standard-of-care (SoC) treatment, on tissue plane adherence and local hemostasis in rhytidectomy patients.

METHODS
In this phase 2, prospective, controlled, randomized, evaluator- and patient-blinded, multicenter study, 45 patients (of 56 possible enrollees) received SoC treatment on 1 side of the face and adjunctive FS VH S/D 4 s-apr treatment on the other side. Outcomes measures included visual assessments of ecchymosis (by blinded reviewers), grading of ecchymosis and edema, drainage volumes, occurrence of hematoma/seroma, safety evaluations, and patient-reported assessments of pain, numbness, and treatment preferences postoperatively.

RESULTS
Mean patient age was 55.1 years. Rates and grades of ecchymosis and edema were similar for the 2 treatments. The mean (SD) drainage volume 24 hours after surgery was 11.5 (13.7) mL from the FS VH S/D 4 s-apr-treated sides of the face and 26.8 (24.0) mL from the SoC-only sides (P < .0001). Patient assessments of pain, numbness, and preference favored treatment with FS VH S/D 4 s-apr. Adverse events were mild to moderate in severity.

CONCLUSIONS
Adjuvant use of FS VH S/D 4 s-apr appears to be safe and results in lower drainage volumes than SoC treatment alone.


An integrated understanding of the wound healing process, pharmacological agents, and surgical techniques are required for comprehensive treatment of wound healing in glaucoma filtration surgery. More well controlled basic and clinical studies are required to clarify the existing ambiguities in the selection of proper pharmacological agents, dosage, timing, and method of delivery. The most promising treatment modalities may be combination drug therapy and the use of bioerodible compounds for a sustained and localized delivery system.