Objectives Three different hypotheses proposed via the controversial evidence from cultural, anthropological and uniparental genetic analysis respectively stated that Tanka people probably originated from Han Chinese, ancient Baiyue tribe, or the admixture of them. Therefore, the genetic origin and admixture history of the Tanka people, an isolated "Gypsies in water" in the coastal region of Southeast China, are needed to be genetically clarified. Materials and methods To elucidate the genetic origin of the Southeast Tanka people and explore their genetic relationship with surrounding indigenous Tai-Kadai and Austronesian people and Neolithic-to-historic ancients from the Yellow River Basin (YRB) and Fujian, we conducted a large-scale population genomic study among 1498 modern and ancient Eurasians, in which 73 Tanka and 4 Han people were first reported here. Both allele-shared and haplotype-based statistical methods were used here, including PCA, ADMIXTURE, f-statistics, ALDER, qpGraph-/TreeMix and qpAdm/qpWave, ChromoPainter and FineSTRUCTURE Results We found a specific genetic cline in PCA plots and detected the Tanka-specific homogeneous ancestry in model-based ADMIXTURE results, suggesting differentiated demographic history between Tanka and surrounding Hans. Formal tests based on sharing allele patterns showed a close relationship between Tanka people and Han Chinese, but the Tanka population harbored more southern East Asian ancestry related to Austronesian and Tai-Kadai people compared with southern Hans. Besides, the reconstructed differentiated demographic history revealed that southern Xinshizhou Tanka harbored more ancestry related to the Tai-Kadai or coastal ancient Neolithic to Bronze Age East Asians compared with northern Shacheng Tanka. The qpGraph-/TreeMix-based phylogenetic framework, qpAdm/qpWave-based admixture modeling and FineSTRUCTURE-based dendrogram among ancient northern and southern East Asians further demonstrated that the primary ancestry of modern Tanka derived from ancient millet farmers in the YRB with additional admixture from multiple southern East Asian sources. Discussion Sharing ancestry estimated from the f-statistics and sharing haplotypic landscape inferred from the ChromoPainter and FineSTRUCTURE showed that Southeast Tanka people not only had a close genetic relationship with both Northern Hans and YRB millet farmers but also possessed more southern East Asian ancestry related to Austronesian, Tai-Kadai and Hmong-Mien people. Our genomic data and fitted admixture models supported modern Tanka originated from ancient North China and obtained additional gene flow from ancient southern East Asians in the processes of southward migrations.


This work demonstrated a-Si:H thin-film solar cells with backside TiO(2)/ SiO(2) distributed Bragg reflectors (DBRs) for applications involving building-integrated photovoltaics (BIPVs). Selectively transparent solar cells are formed by adjusting the positions of the DBR stop bands to allow the transmission of certain parts of light through the solar cells. Measurement and simulation results indicate that the transmission of blue light (430 ~500 nm) with the combination of three DBR mirrors has the highest increase in conversion efficiency.


Background Hypothenar hammer syndrome (HHS) is an uncommon vascular overuse syndrome caused by trauma to the palmar portion of the ulnar artery. Objective In this report, we describe a representative case in the volleyball player as well as a brief approach to clinical features, pathogenesis, diagnosis, imaging and management. Design Case report. Setting Volleyball National Team. Methods The athlete is a 22-year-old right-hand dominant male, national team middle blocker, who presented to the Medical Department for evaluation of painful and paresthetic fourth and fifth digits. He described the affected fingertips and hypothenar region as being tender and sensitive to touch. When queried, he stated that he would use the hypothenar portion of his right hand to spike and block. There was an abnormal Allen test in the right hand with refill of the palmar vasculature with release of the radial artery but no refill with release of the ulnar artery, consistent with a diagnosis of HHS. He started a platelet aggregation inhibitor and was instructed and trained to change his hitting technique. Results On follow-up the athlete's remaining symptom was mild cold sensitivity. He was able to perform his usual sports activities without impairment. Conclusions Typically, HHS occurs in men in their 40s involving the dominant hand and in occupational settings where the workers use the hypothenar portion of the hand as a tool to hammer, push or squeeze hard objects (metal workers, machinists, brick layers, carpenters, etc.). It is a curable and preventable cause of upper extremity digital ischemia, rarely seen in volleyball.


It has been well established that many vaccinia virus proteins suppress host antiviral pathways by targeting the transcription of antiviral proteins, thus evading the host innate immune system. However, whether viral proteins have an effect on the host's overall cellular transcription is less understood. In this study we investigated the regulation of heterochromatin during vaccinia virus infection. Heterochromatin is a highly condensed form of chromatin that is less transcriptionally active and characterized by methylation of histone proteins. We examined the change in methylation of two histone proteins, H3 and H4, which are major markers of heterochromatin, during the course of viral infection. Using immunofluorescence microscopy and flow cytometry we were able to track the overall change in the methylated levels of H3K9 and H4K20. Our results suggest that there is significant increase in methylation of H3K9 and H4K20 during Orthopoxviruses infection compared to mock-infected cells. However, this effect was not seen when we infected cells with Leporipoxviruses. We further screened several vaccinia virus single and multi-gene deletion mutant and identified the vaccinia virus gene K7R as a contributor to the increase in cellular histone methylation during infection.


: Optical and thermochemical properties of E. coli DNA molecules are compared in solutions containing poly(ethyleneglycol) (PEG) in concentrations at which compactization is not yet observed. It is shown that under conditions preceding DNA compactization (CPEG less than 60 mg/ml) changes in CD spectra occur which suggest that the secondary structure of some DNA fragments is altered. These changes of the secondary structure result from dehydration of DNA molecules in PEG-containing solutions. Electron micrographs of DNA molecules obtained under conditions preceding compactization suggest that under these conditions linear DNA molecules may form "four-stranded" fragments as well as double-stranded "loops".


reason that suprarenal fat (to include brown fat) was included among the tissues from cases of sudden, unexplained death in infancy which we had virologically tested5: both enteroviruses and adenoviruses were isolated from these fat samples, but there were no parallel histological studies. It would have been interesting to have virological data in the cases reported by Stephenson and Variend, especially as the diagnoses of their cases 2, 4, and 8 could well have resulted from virus infections. A combined virological and histological investigation might be worth while.


The American descriptivist movement includes the work of Edward Sapir, Leonard Bloomfield, and their students, including Zellig Harris, Charles Hockett, and Kenneth Pike. Their work on morphology set the stage for much of the discussion of the subject in the years that followed, right up to today. In a number of ways they laid greater emphasis on the role of morphemes in morphological analysis when linguists in Europe focused more on the central role played by words in morphosyntactic paradigms.


How much media information, of what kinds and delivered on what devices, do Americans consume? We measure each consumer information stream using three different measures of what is consumed: hours, words and bytes, and sum across each recipient. We estimate that in 2008 Americans consumed about 1.3 trillion hours of information outside of work, an average of almost 12 hours per person per day. Media consumption totaled 3.6 zettabytes and 1,080 trillion words, corresponding to 100,500 words and 34 gigabytes for the average person on an average day. We measure information flows, not stocks, and find that information consumption measured in bytes grew at an annual rate of 5.4% from 1980 to 2008, only a few percentage points greater than GDP growth over this period. We report our findings for different media types, including television, the Internet and computer games, and discuss the utility of analyzing contrasting measures of information consumption in totaling how much media information Americans consume.


PURPOSE
To prospectively assess tolerance to accelerated hyperfractionation radiation therapy in patients undergoing breast-conservation therapy and to exclude, with 90% confidence, a 20% or greater risk of an acute toxic reaction of at least grade 3 (severe).

MATERIALS AND METHODS
Thirty-seven patients (aged 33-80 years) with evaluatable cases received 48 Gy in twice-daily 1.6-Gy fractions to the breast and regional lymph nodes (if three or more lymph nodes were involved) and a boost of 9.6 Gy in twice-daily 1.6-Gy fractions. Acute and late effects were scored by using the Radiation Therapy Oncology Group and European Organization for the Research and Treatment of Cancer radiation morbidity criteria.

RESULTS
One patient developed a grade 3 acute skin toxic reaction and another grade 3 (continuous) acute edema. There have been no grade 4 (life-threatening) acute toxic reactions, local recurrences, or cancer- or treatment-related deaths.

CONCLUSION
This breast-conservation accelerated hyperfractionation radiation therapy schedule is tolerable. Additional follow-up is necessary to determine long-term morbidity and cosmesis, and further study in a larger patient group is necessary to confirm efficacy.


Abstract. Ventricular involvement in neurocysticercosis (NCC), a common serious manifestation of NCC, has distinct clinical presentations, complications, and treatments primarily because of partial or complete obstruction of the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) flow by Taenia solium cysts. We review the clinical course, treatments, and long-term outcomes in 23 of 121 (19.0%) total NCC patients with ventricular cysts referred to the National Institutes of Health from 1985 to the October 2017. Patients had a median age of 31.8 (range: 22.4–52.6 years), were 60.9% male, diagnosed a median of 6.5 years (range: 0.17–16 years) after immigration, and were followed for a median of 3.6 years (range: 0.1–30.5 years). Other forms and manifestations of NCC were present in 73.9% (17/23). The fourth ventricle was involved in a majority (15/23, 65.2%) resulting in hydrocephalus (73.9%), ventriculitis, and periventricular edema (7/23, 30.4%). Cystectomy was accomplished in 60.9%, usually by removal of a fourth ventricular cyst through a suboccipital craniotomy. Nonresectable cysts were treated medically. Ventriculoperitoneal shunts were inserted in 43.5% (10/23) and failed in four, three from infection. Other complications included surgically induced injuries (4/23, 17.4%) and entrapment of a lateral ventricle (2/23, 8.7%). Despite a common severe early course, 90.9% (20/22) stabilized without recurrence, 15% (3/20) complained of mild-to-moderate neurological complaints, and 15% (3/20) were significantly disabled. Four patients who underwent removal of ventricular cysts without significant other NCC and who received with no cysticidal treatment became CSF cestode antigen negative without recurrence indicating that after successful extraction of cysts, additional cysticidal treatment may not be needed.


Although cognitive-behavior therapy emphasizes between-session change, therapist self-disclosure within the session can be an effective tool for strengthening the therapeutic bond and facilitating client change. After noting the use of self-disclosure in other theoretical orientations, we place self-disclosure in the context of cognitive-behavioral theories of reinforcement and modeling. Clinical vignettes illustrate the use of therapist self-disclosure to provide feedback on the interpersonal impact made by the client, enhance positive expectations and motivation, strengthen the therapeutic bond, normalize the client's reaction, reduce the client's fears, and model an effective way of functioning. Therapists need to observe appropriate boundaries when self-disclosing, and in particular, should consider their own motivations for self-disclosing. Although more research is needed on the effects of self-disclosure, cognitive-behavior therapists have found that self-disclosure can be a powerful intervention.


This paper addresses three broad problems in residential design for achieving sufficient ventilation provision with reasonable internal ambient noise levels. The first problem is insufficient qualification of the ventilation conditions that should be achieved while meeting the internal ambient noise level limits. Requirements from different Planning Authorities vary widely; qualification of the ventilation condition is proposed. The second problem concerns the feasibility of natural ventilation with background ventilators; the practical result falls between Building Control and Planning Authority such that appropriate ventilation and internal noise limits may not both be achieved. Greater coordination between planning guidance and Building Regulations is suggested. The third problem concerns noise from mechanical systems that is currently entirely unregulated, yet again can preclude residents from enjoying reasonable indoor air quality and noise levels simultaneously. Surveys from over 1000 dwellings are reviewed, and suitable noise limits for mechanical services are identified. It is suggested that commissioning measurements by third party accredited bodies are required in all cases as the only reliable means to ensure that that the intended conditions are achieved in practice.


A yearly global fire history is a prerequisite for quantifying the contribution of previous fires to the past and present global carbon budget. Vegetation fires can have both direct (combustion) and long‐term indirect effects on the carbon cycle. Every fire influences the ecosystem carbon budget for many years, as a consequence of internal reorganization, decomposition of dead biomass, and regrowth. We used a two‐step process to estimate these effects. First we synthesized the available data available for the 1980s or 1990s to produce a global fire map. For regions with no data, we developed estimates based on vegetation type and history. Second, we then worked backwards to reconstruct the fire history. This reconstruction was based on published data when available. Where it was not, we extrapolated from land use practices, qualitative reports and local studies, such as tree ring analysis. The resulting product is intended as a first approximation for questions about consequences of historical changes in fire for the global carbon budget. We estimate that an average of 608 Mha yr−1 burned (not including agricultural fires) at the end of the 20th century. 86% of this occurred in tropical savannas. Fires in forests with higher carbon stocks consumed 70.7 Mha yr−1 at the beginning of the century, mostly in the boreal and temperate forests of the Northern Hemisphere. This decreased to 15.2 Mha yr−1 in the 1960s as a consequence of fire suppression policies and the development of efficient fire fighting equipment. Since then, fires in temperate and boreal forests have decreased to 11.2 Mha yr−1. At the same time, burned areas increased exponentially in tropical forests, reaching 54 Mha yr−1 in the 1990s, reflecting the use of fire in deforestation for expansion of agriculture. There is some evidence for an increase in area burned in temperate and boreal forests in the closing years of the 20th century.


Enterprise networks are increasingly adopting Layer-3 multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) virtual private network (VPN) technology to connect geographically disparate locations. The any-to-any direct connectivity model of this technology is causing routing tables in the service provider's routers to grow very large. The concept of relaying was proposed earlier to separately minimize the routing table memory footprint of individual VPNs by selecting a small number of hub routers to maintain complete reachability information for each VPN and enabling nonhub spoke routers with reduced routing tables to reach others by routing traffic via a hub. A large service provider network typically hosts thousands of different VPNs. In this paper, we generalize relaying to the multi-VPN environment and consider new constraints on resources shared across VPNs, such as router uplink bandwidth and memory. The hub selection problem involves complex tradeoffs along multiple dimensions including these shared resources and the additional distance traversed by traffic. We formulate the hub selection as a constraint optimization problem and develop an algorithm with provable guarantees to approximate this NP-complete problem. Evaluations using traces and configurations from a large provider indicate that the resulting relaying solution reduces the total router memory requirement by 85% while smoothing out the utilization on each router and requiring only a small increase in the end-to-end path for the relayed traffic.


The idea behind this project was to create a simulation of the evolution of life in CUDA. In this simulation the creatures are individual entities that can interact with the world. Each has its own set of state information and DNA representing it. Through this DNA the creatures evolve via division and mating. The evolution of the DNA during reproduction utilizes crossover and mutation but does not have any sort of fitness function consideration. Each creature itself chooses when and how to reproduce, thus the creatures that live longer and/or reproduce faster will tend to survive better or be more fit. The creatures control their actions and interactions with the world via a recurrent neural network. The structure and weights of this network are encoded into the DNA as well as everything else about the creature. The structure of this report is as follows. It starts with an overview of CUDA and the different facets of it that need to be considered when programing in CUDA. This is followed by a detailed description of the evolutionary model used in the simulation. It continues into the general structure of the data used to represent the simulation. The implementation of the simulation follows and covers both the high and low levels of the code. This section also discusses some of the design considerations with respect to the specific pieces of code being described. Lastly, the results of running the simulation will be discussed and final conclusions will be made.


Background and Purpose— A new generation of carotid artery stents that uses a second micromesh layer to reduce embolic events during carotid artery stenting has recently been introduced. The purpose of this study was to compare acute occlusion rates of these new dual-layer stents with those of single-layer stents in the setting of emergency carotid artery stenting with intracranial mechanical thrombectomy in acute ischemic stroke. Methods— Consecutive patients with acute tandem (intra- and extracranial) lesions of the anterior circulation who were endovascularly treated at our institution were identified from our registry of neuroendovascular interventions. Clinical, angiographic, and neuroimaging data were analyzed. End points included acute occlusions of the carotid stents (within 72 hours after stenting) and symptomatic intracerebral hemorrhage. Results— Forty-seven patients were included. Dual-layer stents (n=20) had a significantly higher rate of acute occlusions than single-layer stents (n=27; 45% versus 3.7%; P=0.001; odds ratio, 21.3; 95% confidence interval, 2.4–188.4). There were no significant differences in the rates of patients who had any antiplatelet or dual antiplatelet medication before admission, in the rates of postinterventional symptomatic intracerebral hemorrhage, the mean National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale scores at admission, or the modified Rankin Scale scores at discharge. Conclusions— The recently introduced dual-layer stents have a higher risk of acute occlusion compared with single-layer stents in the treatment of acute stroke.


Drilling is one of the costliest and risky activities in oil and gas industry due to complexity of interactions with downhole formation. Cyclic loads while drilling cause the initiation and growth of cracks in oil tubulars. This phenomenon, known as fatigue, results in permanent reduction of the failure-free service envelope of a certain tubular. Further, most of the drill string failures are triggered by fatigue, which results from repetitive cyclic bending loads and stresses in tensile or buckled drill strings. Fatigue is a cumulative and non-reversible condition induced by repetitive cyclic bending loads and tensile or buckled drill pipe stresses. Fatigue exists even though cyclic tension of the drill pipe material is much lower than static strength limit. Present work investigates fatigue capacity of the 4" WT38 drill pipe connection where cracks have been observed. In accordance with the geometry of connection, a hot spot stress from bending moment is calculated in the crack location in the first thread (upper) of the pin. The DNVGL-RP-C203 SN-curve B1 "in air" is used as relevant fatigue SN curve for the drill pipe thread location. Finite element method (FEM) is employed in modeling and analyzing of drill pipe on pin-box connections. With this method, various connections can be investigated relatively faster and cheaper compared with experimental tests. It is found that the fatigue failure may have been caused as a result of the cyclic load level and number of load cycles. A detailed discussion of the fatigue damage assessment concludes the paper.


Long-term personal GPS data is useful for many UbiComp services such as traffic monitoring and environmental impact assessment. However, inference attacks on such traces can reveal private information including home addresses and schedules. We asked 32 participants from 12 households to collect 2 months of GPS data, and showed it to them in visualizations. We explored if they understood how their individual privacy concerns mapped onto 5 location obfuscation schemes (which they largely did), which obfuscation schemes they were most comfortable with (Mixing, Deleting data near home, and Randomizing), how they monetarily valued their location data, and if they consented to share their data publicly. 21/32 gave consent to publish their data, though most households' members shared at different levels, which indicates a lack of awareness of privacy interrelationships. Grounded in real decisions about real data, our findings highlight the potential for end-user involvement in obfuscation of their own location data.


PURPOSE
To evaluate cancer detection with directed biopsy of the prostate on the basis of high-frequency Doppler ultrasonographic (US) findings, and to determine the effect of patient position on the observed flow pattern.

MATERIALS AND METHODS
Thirty-two patients were evaluated in the left lateral decubitus position with gray-scale, color Doppler, and power Doppler transrectal US. Up to four directed biopsy specimens were obtained on the basis of gray-scale and Doppler US findings, and modified sextant biopsy followed. Analysis of variance and the Wilcoxon signed rank test were used to evaluate the distribution of Doppler signals within the prostate. Three healthy volunteers with no known prostate disease were also examined in supine and both decubitus positions.

RESULTS
In the patient group, both color and power Doppler US demonstrated increased flow on the left side of the prostate, with greater flow toward the base of the gland (P <.002). Consequently, 62 of 90 directed-biopsy cores were obtained in the left base and mid-gland. The positive biopsy rate for directed biopsy was not significantly different from that of sextant biopsy (P =.4). Seven patients had cancer that was identified with sextant biopsy, but only four cancers were identified with directed biopsy. Each of the three healthy volunteers demonstrated increased Doppler flow on the dependent side when the subject was in the lateral decubitus position.

CONCLUSION
The positive yield of directed biopsy was similar to the yield of sextant biopsy. On the basis of observations made in healthy volunteers, the authors conclude that flow asymmetry in patients who underwent biopsy may have been related to patient position.


E-Government (E-Govt) presents a tremendous impetus to progress forward by delivering the government's services in an effective and convenient manner. However, the development of E-Govt is not without challenges. This slow progress is highly influenced by the existence of technological and non-technological issues. This study considers the technological sophistication as an important pushing factor for the advancement of E-Govt development in a country and studied their relationship over the period of 7 years (2010-2016). Countries' E-Govt data was obtained from the United Nation's E-Govt annual surveys while data for technological sophistication was obtained from Global Information Technology Reports published by World Economic Forum. Using panel data of 7 years, the analysis was performed for 148 countries by applying Random Effect Model. Findings suggest that Technological Sophistication acted as a major constituent for E-Govt development. Additionally, in general countries positions have improved regarding E-Govt during the selected time period.


Ganglioneuromas (GNs) are benign tumors resulting from neural crest tissue. GNs contain mature ganglion cells and Schwann cells. GNs most commonly occur in the retroperitoneum and posterior mediastinum. GNs rarely occur in the adrenal gland. A 45-year-old asymptomatic patient presented with an incidental finding of left renal mass. A 10 cm mass lesion located in the upper pole of the left kidney and lymphadenopathy in renal hilus were detected. The patient underwent transperitoneal radical nephrectomy involving the removal of left adrenal gland. The immunohistochemical examination showed strong positive staining for S100, neuron-specific enolase, synaptophysin and chromogranin. The diagnosis of mature GN was established. GNs are among the rare diseases that should be considered in the evaluation of renal masses, particularly in the differential diagnosis of upper pole tumors of the kidneys. It can be confused with renal cell carcinomas.


MEK inhibitors are clinically active in BRAF V600E melanomas, but only marginally so in KRAS-mutant tumors. While MEK inhibitor treatment resulted in sustained inhibition of ERK phopshorylation in BRAF V600E tumors, it was associated with a rebound in ERK phosphorylation after prolonged exposure in KRAS mutant tumors. To understand this phenomenon, we performed an RNAi screen in a KRAS-mutant model and found that CRAF knockdown enhanced the antiproliferative effects of MEK inhibition both in vivo and in vitro. In agreement with previous findings, MEK inhibitor treatment in KRAS mutant cells resulted in CRAF reactivation and induction of MEK phosphorylation. However, MEK activated by CRAF was less susceptible to traditional MEK inhibitors, such as PD0325901, compared to when activated by BRAF V600E. Consistent with this observation, the rebound in ERK phosphorylation following MEK inhibitor treatment in KRAS mutant tumors was dependent on intact CRAF expression. Furthermore, traditional MEK inhibitors induced RAF-MEK complexes in KRAS mutant models, and disrupting these complexes enhanced the inhibition of CRAF-dependent ERK signaling. In an effort to identify more effective compounds we found that newer MEK inhibitors, such as trametinib and CH5126766, do not only target the catalytic activity of MEK, but in addition, they also impair its reactivation by CRAF. This occurs through two distinct mechanisms: trametinib disrupts RAF-MEK complex formation, as evidenced by co-immunoprecipitation of endogenous proteins and surface plasmon resonance assays with purified enzymes. Instead, CH512676 induces the interaction of MEK with RAF, yet it prevents the phosphorylation of MEK in this complex. To elucidate the mechanism responsible for the latter property, we determined the ternary structure of CH512676-bound MEK1. CH5126766 interacts with Asn 221 and Ser 222 residues in MEK1 to displace the activation segment and disrupt RAF-mediated phosphorylation. These data provide a blueprint for developing better MEK inhibitors that effectively inhibit ERK signaling in KRAS mutant tumors. Citation Format: Piro Lito, Anna Saborowski, Jingyin Yue, Martha Solomon, Eric Joseph, Christof Fellman, Kazuhiro Ohara, Kenji Morikami, Takaaki Miura, Christine Lucas, Nobuya Ishii, Scott Lowe, Neal Rosen. Disruption of CRAF-mediated MEK activation is required for effective MEK inhibition in KRAS mutant tumors. [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 105th Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research; 2014 Apr 5-9; San Diego, CA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2014;74(19 Suppl):Abstract nr 4758. doi:10.1158/1538-7445.AM2014-4758


In early secretory transport, coat recruitment for the formation of coat protein I (COPI) vesicles involves binding to donor Golgi membranes of the small GTPase ADP-ribosylation factor 1 and subsequent attachment of the cytoplasmic heptameric complex coatomer. Various hypotheses exist as to the precise role of and possible routes taken by COPI vesicles in the mammalian cell. Here we report the ubiquitous expression of two novel isotypes of coatomer subunits (cid:1) - and (cid:2) -COP that are incorporated into coatomer, and show that three isotypes exist of the complex defined by the subunit combinations (cid:1) 1/ (cid:2) 1, (cid:1) 1/ (cid:2) 2, and (cid:1) 2/ (cid:2) 1. In a liver cytosol, these forms make up the total coatomer in a ratio of about 2:1:2, respectively. The coatomer isotypes are located differ- entially within the early secretory pathway, and the (cid:1) 2/ (cid:2) 1 isotype is preferentially incorporated into COPI vesicles. A population of COPI vesicles was characterized that almost exclusively contains (cid:1) 2/ (cid:2) 1 coatomer. This existence of three structurally different forms of coatomer will need to be considered in future models of COPI-mediated


Abstract Despite China's recent remarkable performance in high-quality research, the number of students going abroad to pursue doctoral degrees in STEM fields has been rising rapidly. This study investigates the motivations of Chinese international doctoral students (CIDS) in STEM fields for undertaking a PhD abroad, and the external factors influencing this major life decision. Based on in-depth interviews with 35 CIDS from seven universities in four Australian states, the findings show that for the current generation, enriching life experiences and self-cultivation emerged as most prominent personal motivations. The choice to study abroad, though ultimately a personal decision, was influenced by a range of factors and particularly long-term cooperation between host and home institutions. Both academic and personal reputation of supervisors played important roles in the selection of host institutions. This study may be of value to supervisors and higher education policy-makers, at institutional and government levels in all countries, whether "home" or "host", invested in sustainable international doctoral education.


Details:
The Concertino for Trombone was composed for Vinko Globokar and performed only once, with Leibowitz conducting, in
Ljubljana in 1960. As guest composer at the Suntory Hall Summer Festival 2004, Globokar was invited to choose a work
influential to his own development; he chose Leibowitz's work. The 2004 performance given by Professor Webb was the second
performance of the Concertino, and the premiere recording of this work.

Portfolio:
Performances of Leibowitz Four Bagatelles for Trombone and Piano (1963), prepared with pianist Nika Shirocorad, at Bacau
Contemporary Music Days 17th Edition, Romania; Chengdu International Contemporary Music Festival, China; University of
Huddersfield. Programmes associated.
Performances of both the Concertino and the Bagatelles were prepared in consultation with Vinko Globokar.

Context:
At Vinko Globokar's recommendation, Professor Webb was the soloist in this performance of Leibowitz's Concertino.
Preparation for the performance required substantial consultation with Globokar, the original interpreter of the work. Since the
original trombone part (the original materials are with the Paul Sacher Foundation) is faded, detailed work was necessary to
reinstate original staves, phrasing and articulation – much of which was verified through further consultation with Globokar.
Without this research to produce a definitive solo part, future performances of this work would be difficult and inaccurate. During
the same period Professor Webb gave several performances of Leibowitz's Four Bagatelles for Trombone and Piano (1963),
with pianist Nika Shirocorad. The preparatory work needed to perform these latter works also involved research with Globokar,
who was able to convey information that is not contained in the composer's manuscript score.


Disorders of hepatic energy metabolism, which can be regulated by endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress, lead to metabolic diseases such as hepatic steatosis and hypoglycemia. Tunicamycin, a pharmacological ER stress inducer, is used to develop an anti-cancer drug. However, the effects of tunicamycin on hepatic energy metabolism have not been well elucidated. Mice were intraperitoneally injected with tunicamycin or vehicle. Twenty-four hours later, hepatic triglyceride and glycogen content and serum lipids profiles were analyzed, as well as the expression of lipogenic and gluconeogenic genes. Tunicamycin significantly induced hepatic a yellowish color and ER stress, as well as increasing serum levels of aspartate transaminase and alanine transaminase. Besides, tunicamycin remarkably increased hepatic triglyceride content and suppressed the expression of apolipoprotein B100. In addition, tunicamycin-treated mice had lower serum levels of triglyceride, apolipoprotein B, low-density lipoprotein cholesterol and high-density lipoprotein cholesterol. Gene expression of peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor α was decreased by tunicamycin, but the protein level was increased. Furthermore, blood glucose level and hepatic glycogen content were decreased in tunicamycin-treated mice. Protein kinase B signaling was attenuated in the tunicamycin-treated liver, but the expression and activities of phosphoenolpyruvate carboxykinase and glucose-6-phosphatase were unchanged. Tunicamycin alters hepatic energy homeostasis by increasing triglyceride accumulation and decreasing glycogen content.


We propose a method for reliable prediction in multi-class classification, where reliability refers to the possibility of partial abstention in cases of uncertainty. More specifically, we allow for predictions in the form of preorder relations on the set of classes, thereby generalizing the idea of set-valued predictions. Our approach relies on combining learning by pairwise comparison with a recent proposal for modeling uncertainty in classification, in which a distinction is made between reducible (a.k.a. epistemic) uncertainty caused by a lack of information and irreducible (a.k.a. aleatoric) uncertainty due to intrinsic randomness. The problem of combining uncertain pairwise predictions into a most plausible preorder is then formalized as an integer programming problem. Experimentally, we show that our method is able to appropriately balance reliability and precision of predictions.


Diamond-like carbon (DLC)–steel contacts become more and more popular in the industry now. Since the surface chemical properties of DLC are quite different from those of iron, traditional formulated lubricants have problems to form tribo-chemical films, which are effective to improve the tribological performance for steel-steel contacts, on the surface of DLC. Thus, new lubricants formulation strategies are needed to be considered for steel-DLC applications. A kind of green lubricant (lignin-[Choline][L-Proline] (L-[CH][Pro])) without any traditional tribo-chemical active element, i.e., free of P, S, B, etc., was studied in this paper for the steel-DLC contact. To find the difference between this new ILs and the traditional lubricants, a commercially available fully formulated lubricant was used as a reference. An Optimol SRV-III oscillating friction and wear tester was used to evaluate the tribological performance. Three different kinds of commercially available DLC coatings (Tribobond 40(Cr + a-C:H:W), Tribobond 43 [(Cr+) a-C:H), and Tribobond 44(a-C:Cr)] were investigated. The results show that the ILs exhibit an obviously lower friction coefficient than that of the traditional commercially available fully formulated lubricant. Among those three DLC coatings, the (Cr+) a-C:H DLC coating exhibits the biggest improvement of wear resistance lubricated with the new ILs than that of the commercially available fully formulated lubricant. It's expected that its excellent tribological properties are attributed to the affinity of the ILs to the metal surface and the strength of the ionic liquids interactions by hydrogen bonding. Thus, forming strong physical adsorption strategy, instead of forming chemical tribo-films, is recommended to enhance the lubricating performance of lubricants for DLC.


SUMMARY Staphylococcus aureus is the most important causative agent of subclinical mastitis in cattle resulting in reduced milk production and quality. Methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA) strains has a clear zoonotic relevance, especially in the case of occupational exposure. The aim of the study was to evaluate the prevalence of S. aureus and MRSA in bulk tank milk (BTM) from dairy cattle herds in the Lombardy Region (Northern Italy) and to identify the main MRSA circulating genotypes. MRSA strains were characterized by susceptibility testing, multi-locus sequence typing (MLST), spa typing and SCCmec typing. A total 844 BTM samples were analysed and S. aureus and MRSA were detected in 47·2% and 3·8% of dairy herds, respectively. MLST showed that the majority (28/32) of isolates belonged to the typical livestock-associated lineages: ST398, ST97 and ST1. Interestingly, in this study we report for the first time the new ST3211, a single locus variant of ST(CC)22, with the newly described 462 aroE allele. Our study indicates high diffusion of S. aureus mastitis and low, but not negligible, prevalence of MRSA in the considered area, suggesting the need for planning specific control programmes for bovine mastitis caused by S. aureus, especially when MRSA is implicated.


This study was conducted to assess the knowledge, attitudes, and assumption of cervical cancer by women living in Maroua, the capital of the Far North Province of Cameroon. In a 1-month period, 171 women were surveyed as to their socioeconomic status, sexual habits, prior knowledge of cervical cancer, its prevention, and their attitudes toward cervical cancer. Of 171 women, 48 (28%) had prior knowledge of cervical cancer; they were classified as the " aware group" compared with 123 of 171 (72%) women who were uninformed about cervical cancer and they were classified as the " unaware group" (UG). The UG of women tended to be single mothers, illiterate, housewives, and had their first child before the age of 20 (P< 0.005). Despite the awareness of cervical cancer by 28% of women, only a minority of them, 4 of 48 (8.3%), underwent a preventative screening test. Only 71 of 171 (41.5%) women stated that they would be having a screening test in the future. The awareness of cervical cancer by women in Cameroon is still inadequate. Thus, to avoid deaths from cervical cancer, a curable and preventable disease, the need of an aggressive campaign to make Cameroonian women aware of cervical cancer and its prevention is needed.


Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is a lethal disease with few therapeutic options. Recently, insight into cancer biology suggested abnormal lipid metabolism to be a risk factor for human malignancies. As a key enzyme implicated in lipid metabolism, PLD1 was elevated in various human cancer associating with malignant phenotypes. However, little was known about its expression and function in PDAC. We showed that PLD1 was elevated in both the cell lines and clinical samples of PDAC, and it positively correlated with vascular invasion (p = 0.041) and responsible for a poor prognosis (p = 0.009). Meanwhile, we also found Sp1 to be elevated in the disease, correlating with vascular invasion (p = 0.007). Moreover, the correlation assay suggested that PLD1 positively correlated with Sp1 in the clinical sample (r = 0.390; p < 0.001) and the cell lines. Finally, we showed that co-high expression of both the factors confers the poorest prognosis for the patients, and that their simultaneous high expression might be an independent prognostic factor (p = 0.001; HR = 3.427; 95% CI 1.629−7.211).


AIM
This study investigated the prevalence of possible sarcopenia (PSA) in a large sample of middle-aged and older adults, and determined the association between PSA, major chronic diseases and the number of chronic diseases.

METHODS
A total of 14 917 adults aged ≥40 years were included in the analysis. The handgrip strength and the five-time chair stand test were used to assess PSA. The participants' major chronic diseases were divided into 14 categories. Four categories were created based on the participants' number of chronic illnesses: 0, 1, 2 and ≥3.

RESULTS
The present study found an overall prevalence of PSA of 23.6% among Chinese middle-aged and older adults aged ≥40 years, with the risk increasing with advancing age. PSA was significantly associated with most categories of chronic diseases and multimorbidity. The closely independent associations were obtained for stroke; emotional, nervous or psychiatric problems; chronic lung disease, asthma, heart disease, hypertension and arthritis or rheumatism. Compared with participants with 0 chronic disease, those with two or more chronic diseases had higher odds for PSA. However, the association between PSA and the number of chronic diseases varied in different sex and age groups.

CONCLUSIONS
The findings suggest that PSA is associated with major chronic diseases among middle-aged and older adults. People with two or more chronic diseases have a greater likelihood of PSA compared with those without chronic diseases, and the association between PSA and the number of chronic diseases largely depended on sex and age. Geriatr Gerontol Int 2023; ••: ••-••.


The prominence of phishing has risen over the past years, with the number of unique attacks reaching an all time high in 2016. Attacks can be deployed with minimal cost and effort, enabling attackers to launch large volumes of attacks in short spaces of time. The fast-paced nature of phishing makesautomated detection processes critical for the safe-guarding of Internet users.This study investigates the use of machine learning for phishing detection, with features extracted from the URL only. Through experimentation, a set of 87 effective features were identified, including a significant number of novel features not found in existing research. An evaluation of classificationalgorithms identified that a Random Forest model with 150 trees maximized classification performance,obtaining an F1 score of 0.92 and ROC AUC of 0.97 when testing on a noisy data set of URLs obtained from spam email - a major communication channel where phishing attacks are found. A comparison against existing research indicated that the model built in this study outperforms state-of-the-artlexical classifiers, and often outperforms classifiers that use external features too.The obtained results were used to build a large-scale lexical classifier, Poseidon, that is able to acceleratethe classification of phishing sites, reducing the load on a more expensive classification process by99%. It is shown that Poseidon outperforms existing systems of this nature with respect to various evaluation metrics. Testing on a live feed of 2 million unlabelled URLs/day, Poseidon is able to detect 6000 phishing attacks/month, costing $0.01 per true positive when using a mainstream cloud servicesprovider.This study is one of the few to evaluate classification in a real-life scenario, using phishing and benign URLs retrieved from an environment in which a large proportion of phishing attacks operate.


In spite of the rapidly growing bioenergy production worldwide, there is lack of field experience and experimental data on the cultivation of bioenergy crops. This study aims to advance crop management operations and modelling studies by providing essential information on phenology, agronomy and crop physiology of three Mediterranean bioenergy crops: Helianthus annuus (sunflower), Hibiscus cannabinus (kenaf) and Cynara cardunculus (cynara). These crops cover a wide range of bio-industrial applications and fit into different cropping strategies. For these crops, we identified the most important knowledge gaps and performed a series of field experiments to fill some of those, particularly for cynara. Information on phenology and seed yield potential for cynara was missing mainly due to its complex inflorescence structure. This thesis codifies and describes cynara's phenological growth stages according to the universal BBCH coding system. This scale can be used by everyone involved in the production of this crop under all circumstances. In addition, we present a robust allometric model for estimating seed yield under diverse management and environmental conditions. Inputs to the model are two easily quantifiable inflorescence traits: total weight and number of seed-bearing heads per unit area. Additionally, this thesis investigates factors at leaf, canopy and crop level that determine biomass production for all tested crops and provides key parameters for crop growth modelling. Leaf photosynthesis and respiration rates in response to light, temperature and leaf nitrogen were quantified. Based on such data, a biochemical model for C3 leaf photosynthesis and an empirical model for respiration were parameterized and validated. Then, to upscale these rates from the leaf to the canopy level, light- and nitrogen extinction coefficients over time and in response to water availability were determined in detail. It was shown that the light extinction coefficient changes under water stress conditions and time of year, while leaf nitrogen only shows a strong vertical distribution within crop canopy during the mid-season. Relevant agronomic data, such as biomass production over time and leaf area index in response to management practices, are also presented for the three crops. This thesis contributes to the general objective of gaining more insight into bioenergy production from crop species. The findings can help farmers, researchers and modellers to better evaluate agricultural land uses and to improve biomass quantity and quality. Among the studied species, the perennial cynara shows the greatest potential for energy production in the Mediterranean region because a significant part of the production is achieved in the winter–spring period relying on natural rainfall. Key words: cynara, kenaf, sunflower, phenology, agronomy, crop physiology, modelling, biomass production, crop growth, growth stages, BBCH code, seed yield, oil/seed ratio, leaf area index, leaf nitrogen, light and nitrogen extinction coefficients, photosynthesis, respiration, respiration acclimation, bioenergy, Greece, Mediterranean region.


Yam is a daily nutritional food requirement for man and in order to facilitate the processing of yam for consumption, a yam pounding machine has been developed using mainly some locally sourced materials. The machine consists of a shaft, pulleys, belt, bearings, electric motor, yam beaters, bowl and the frame. The machine was developed to enhance the hygienic processing of yam for both domestic and commercial consumption, while eliminating the tedious and laborious indigenous process of preparing pounded yam. Keywords: Yam, pounding machine, hygienic processing, yam beaters


This course is an introduction to biology and chemistry, stressing the relatedness and interdependence of biological concepts and their associated chemical features.


OBJECTIVE
To study the clinical presentations, management, outcomes as well as pregnancy rate of ejaculatory duct obstruction treated at the Division of Urology, Ramathibodi Hospital.

MATERIAL AND METHOD
This retrospective study was done from 1980 to 1999 and information from the medical records of the patients of ejaculatory duct obstruction was obtained. Phone and mail were used for long-term follow-up.

RESULTS
Seven male patients with ejaculatory duct obstruction were identified. The age ranged from 32-45 years old (mean 34.5). All of the patients had azoospermia without other symptoms related to ejaculatory duct obstruction such as painful ejaculation, perineal or testicular pain. Normal testicles and secondary sex characteristics were noted in all. Seventy-one per cent had normal hormonal profiles and twenty-nine per cent had a slight increase of FSH, LH but not more than one fold of normal range. Vasography was used as the diagnosis tool in all of the cases and 71 per cent of seminal vesicles were >1.5 cm in diameter and all the rest were 1 cm in diameter. Transurethral resection of ejaculatory duct (TURED) was done in 6 cases and transurethral incision of ejaculatory duct (TUIED) was done in 1 case. Semen analysis was done in the third month after operation and 4 of 7 (57%) showed improvement of semen analysis but another 3 cases (43%) still had azoospermia. Six months after operation 6 of 7 (86%) showed improvement of semen analysis. Up to one year, 6 of 7 (86%) have normal semen analysis and another one still had azoospermia. In the long-term follow-up, 4 of 7 (57%) were able to impregnate their wives.

CONCLUSIONS
Ejaculatory duct obstruction is a treatable cause of male infertility. In an infertile male with oligospermia or azoospermia with low ejaculate volume, normal secondary sex characteristics, testes and normal hormonal profiles, ejaculatory duct obstruction is suggested. Transrectal ultrasonography (TRUS) and/or vasography can be done to confirm the dilatation of seminal vesicles and obstruction of the ejaculatory duct. Transurethral resection of the ejaculatory duct (TURED) has resulted in marked improvement in semen parameters, and pregnancies have been achieved.


OBJECTIVE
The aim of this study was to assess, through biological analysis, the local effects and osseointegration of dental implants incorporating surface micro/nanofeatures compared with implants of identical design without surface treatment.

BACKGROUND
Known to impact bone cell behavior, surface chemical and topography modifications target improved osseointegration and long-term success of dental implants. Very few studies assess the performance of implants presenting both micro- and nanofeatures in vivo on the animal models used in preclinical studies for medical device certification.

METHODS
Implant surfaces were characterized in terms of topography and surface chemical composition. After 4 weeks and 13 weeks of implantation in sheep femoral condyles, forty implants were evaluated through micro-computed tomography, histopathologic, and histomorphometric analyses.

RESULTS
No local adverse effects were observed around implants. Histomorphometric analyses showed significantly higher bone-to-implant contact in the coronal region of the surface-treated implant at week 4 and week 13, respectively, was 79.3 ± 11.2% and 86.4 ± 6.7%, compared with the untreated implants (68.3 ± 8.8% and 74.8 ± 13%). Micro-computed tomography analyses revealed that healing patterns differed between coronal and apical regions, with higher coronal bone-to-implant contact at week 13. Histopathologic results showed, at week 13, bone healing around the surface-treated implant with undistinguishable defect margins, while the untreated implant still presented bone condensation and traces of the initial drill defect.

CONCLUSION
Our results suggest that the surface-treated implant not only shows no deleterious effects on local tissues but also promotes faster bone healing around the implant.


Many genes are regulated by androgen and its receptor (AR), but the direct target genes of AR, especially those involved in spermatogenesis and male infertility, remain unclear. Here, we identified ubiquitin-conjugating enzyme E2B (Ube2b) as a critical target gene of AR. The expression of Ube2b was decreased in the testes of Sertoli cell AR knockout (S-AR -/y ) mice analyzed by qRT-PCR and immunofluorescence. The upregulation of Ube2b gene by testosterone was further demonstrated by Western blot, qRT-PCR in TM4 cells, a mouse Sertoli cell line. Moreover, luciferase assay, EMSA and ChIP assay validated that the ligand-bound AR activated Ube2b transcription via direct binding to the androgen responsive element of the Ube2b promoter. In vitro analyses showed that testosterone increased Ube2b expression and activated H2A ubiquitylation, while downregulation of Ube2b blocked the testosterone-induced H2A ubiquitylation. The ubiquitylation of H2A was markedly decreased in the testes of S-AR -/y mice by immunohistochemistry. Digital gene expression analysis showed that 113 genes were significantly downregulated and 71 were upregulated by UBE2B in TM4 cells. These results suggest that Ube2b as a direct AR transcriptional target in Sertoli cells mediates the function of AR in spermatogenesis by promoting H2A ubiquitylation. Summary sentence: Androgen and its receptor directly upregulates Ube2b gene expression via the potential ARE element.


Purpose: To develop a model that allows for understanding the physical properties and the effect of readout parameters on objective image quality metrics of a 'flying spot' computed radiography(CR)system.Method and Materials: A Monte Carlo simulation method [Fasbender et al., Nucl Instrum Methods Phys Res A 512 (2003): 610–8] that describes the optical transport in a 'flying spot' readout was implemented by adapting the code of Jacques [Photochem Photobiol 67 (1998), 23–32]. This program was coupled with a 'parallel‐cascades' approach [Yao and Cunningham, Med Phys 28 (2000): 2020–38] to predict systemMTF and DQE. Grain size was assumed to follow a normal distribution in the imaging plate (IP) and granular noise was determined using the works of Nutting and Siedentopf. Additional assumptions include, orthogonal x‐ray incidence, no scatter, no glare, no defects in the IP, a constant discharge fraction, and a linear readout amplifier were assumed for a linear and wide‐sense stationary process. X‐ray spectra representative of radiography and mammography were used in the simulations. Published or estimated parameters that correspond to two common IPs were compiled from multiple sources. Results: For radiography with 0.2‐mm sampling, model results showed good agreement with published literature values for systemMTF (r>0.99) and moderate agreement for DQE (r = 0.75 to 0.99) over four orders of incident exposure (0.03 to 30‐mR). For mammography with 0.1‐mm sampling, model results showed good agreement with published literature values for systemMTF (r>0.99) and for DQE (r = 0.95 to 0.99) over two orders of incident exposure (∼1 to 100‐mR). Conclusion: The proposed model facilitates identifying factors that could improve CR performance. Accurate estimates of IP parameters and model improvements such as incorporation of Lubberts' effect could further improve model accuracy. Supported in part by NIH R01EB004015 and Georgia Cancer Coalition award.


Training large transformer models is one of the most important computational challenges of modern AI. In this paper, we show how to significantly accelerate training of large transformer models by reducing activation recomputation. Activation recomputation is commonly used to work around memory capacity constraints. Rather than storing activations for backpropagation, they are traditionally recomputed, which saves memory but adds redundant compute. In this work, we show most of this redundant compute is unnecessary because we can reduce memory consumption sufficiently without it. We present two novel yet very simple techniques: sequence parallelism and selective activation recomputation. In conjunction with tensor parallelism, these techniques almost eliminate the need to recompute activations. We evaluate our approach on language models up to one trillion parameters in scale and show that our method reduces activation memory by 5x, while reducing execution time overhead from activation recomputation by over 90%. For example, when training a 530B parameter GPT-3 style model on 2240 NVIDIA A100 GPUs, we achieve a Model Flops Utilization of 54.2%, which is 29% faster than the 42.1% we achieve using recomputation. Our implementation will be available in both Megatron-LM and NeMo-Megatron.


: In order to ascertain the damaging effects on the glandular parenchyma and excretory system of the major salivary glands of sialography using iodate contrast media in an oily vehicle, experiments have been carried out on a group of dogs. Among other compounds, Lipiodol UF and Urovison were used, the former oil-based and the latter water-based. Histological slides of the injected gland made three and four weeks afterwards showed in one animal only the presence of a periductal infiltrate and an intracanalicular formation of hyaline thrombotic type that was not easy to interpret. Lipiodol UF was employed in this case. Comparing these results with the literature, it is concluded that Lipiodol is an irritant, especially if it passes beyond the salivary excretory tree, but this is not enough to have it banned absolutely. Contraindications are reported and the need for correct technique stressed.


To test the role of glutamic acid decarboxylase (GAD65) or bovine serum albumin (BSA) autoimmunity in the pathogenesis of diabetes, GAD65 or BSA was injected intraperitoneally into neonatal female NOD mice (100 micrograms/mouse of each protein). Treatment with GAD65, but not with BSA, significantly delayed the onset of diabetes compared with control mice (P < 0.05). At 18 weeks, 6 of 10 control mice compared with 0 of 10 GAD65-treated mice (P = 0.005) and 7 of 14 BSA-treated mice had developed diabetes. However, after 79 weeks, 6 of 10 of the GAD65-treated mice were diabetic compared with 9 of 10 of the control mice and 12 of 14 of the BSA-treated mice. In GAD65-treated mice without diabetes, insulitis was markedly reduced compared with control or BSA-treated mice (P < 10−4). To further elucidate why GAD becomes an autoantigen, the expression in NOD mice islets was studied. Quantitative immunohistochemistry revealed that islet cell expression of GAD was increased in 5-week-old NOD mice compared with BALB/c mice (P = 0.02). With the occurrence of insulitis (9–15 weeks), the GAD expression was further increased relative to 5-week-old NOD mice (P < 0.02). In conclusion, GAD, but not BSA, autoimmunity is important for the development of diabetes in NOD mice. Furthermore, concordant with the appearance of insulitis, the GAD expression increased in NOD mouse islets, which could possibly potentiate the β-cell-directed autoimmunity.


Porta Valbona in Urbino: its representation between history and restorationThe Porta Valbona study is part of a complex project of conservation and valorisation of the defensive walls of Urbino that the research group, of the School of Conservation and Restoration of the University of Urbino Carlo Bo, has developed in recent years. Built in 1621 it is the most important gate of the city both because it is connected to Via Mazzini, one of the main streets of the historic centre, and for its spectacular architectural appearance created for the wedding of Prince Federico Ubaldo della Rovere with Princess Claudia de Medici. The two eagles, in limestone, placed at the sides of the door, date back to the mid-eighteenth century and are the work of the Rimini architect Giovan Francesco Buonamici. It is also the only Gate of Urbino which has a monumental facing facing outwards, or towards Piazza del Mercatale. Despite having undergone several restorations and consolidations over the centuries, it has not been modified in its original appearance. Porta Valbona, together with the city walls, represents a real urban palimpsest, an exceptional case of sedimentation and stratification which, despite the events, still allows us to reconstruct its historical events. The applied design method was based on the following analyzes: a) urban analysis: knowledge of the characteristics and urban potential of the door; b) historical analysis: knowledge of the historical evolution and of the specific qualities of the door; c) geometric analysis: metric and architectural survey; d) material analysis, study of materials and forms of deterioration; e) structural analysis: identification of the morphological and constructive organization from the structural point of view. All the large amount of information obtained from the analysis was managed thanks to the use of GIS systems. Thus it was possible to identify the shape and character of the monument and its testimonial, constructive and architectural values were recognized. On the basis of an internal analysis of the cultural asset and an external analysis of the context in which it is located, it was possible to define the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.


U.S. military influenza surveillance utilizes electronic reporting of clinical diagnoses to monitor health of military personnel and detect naturally occurring and bioterrorism-related epidemics. While accurate, these systems lack in timeliness. More recently, researchers have used novel data sources to detect influenza in real-time and capture non-traditional populations. With data-mining techniques, military social media users are identified and influenza-related discourse is integrated along with medical data into a comprehensive disease model. By leveraging heterogeneous data streams and developing dashboard biosurveillance analytics, the researchers hope to increase the speed at which outbreaks are detected and provide accurate disease forecasting among military personnel.


"Shared prosperity" is a common phrase in current development policy discourse. Its most widely used operational definition—the growth rate in the average income of the poorest 40% of a country's population—is a truncated measure of change in social welfare. A related concept, the shared prosperity premium—the difference between the growth rate of the mean for the bottom 40% and the growth rate in the overall mean—is similarly analogous to a measure of change in inequality. This article reviews the relationship between these concepts and the more established ideas of social welfare, poverty, inequality, and mobility.
 Household survey data can be used to shed light on recent progress in terms of this indicator globally. During 2008–2013, mean incomes for the poorest 40% rose in 60 of the 83 countries for which we have data. In 49 of them, accounting for 65% of the sampled population, it rose faster than overall average incomes, thus narrowing the income gap.
 In the policy space, there are examples both of "pre-distribution" policies (which promote human capital investment among the poor) and "re-distribution" policies (such as targeted safety nets), which when well-designed have a sound empirical track record of both raising productivity and improving well-being among the poor.


This exploratory study examined the potential of using sport as a creative and engaging context to facilitate life skills development in socially vulnerable youth in Eswatini, who face major context-specific challenges to their healthy development. The sport for development program was designed using the Teaching Personal and Social Responsibility model with adaptations made to fit the cultural context. Participants in the program were local coaches (N=3 males) and socially vulnerable youth (N=48, 25 females and 23 males) aged 11-15 years old, recruited from a community-based organization. Coaches were trained as the primary implementers of the program. Data collection employed a mixed-methods approach that triangulated data from surveys, learning quizzes, focus groups, and interviews. Findings supported the potential value of the program in cultivating the development and possible transfer of personal responsibility (e.g., selfdirection skills such as goal setting and decision making) and social responsibility (e.g., interpersonal skills such as respect, self-control, conflict resolution, and caring) behaviors. The study provided preliminary support for the contextual utility of engendering these developmental outcomes in an environment where youth are facing a major health threat (i.e., HIV/AIDS) and community challenges (e.g., gender-based violence, poverty). Continued investment in long-term sport for development programming in Eswatini is warranted.


Multi-turn conversation understanding is a major challenge for building intelligent dialogue systems. This work focuses on retrieval-based response matching for multi-turn conversation whose related work simply concatenates the conversation utterances, ignoring the interactions among previous utterances for context modeling. In this paper, we formulate previous utterances into context using a proposed deep utterance aggregation model to form a fine-grained context representation. In detail, a self-matching attention is first introduced to route the vital information in each utterance. Then the model matches a response with each refined utterance and the final matching score is obtained after attentive turns aggregation. Experimental results show our model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on three multi-turn conversation benchmarks, including a newly introduced e-commerce dialogue corpus.


Political districting in the United States is a decennial process of redrawing the boundaries of congressional and state legislative districts. The notion of fairness in political districting has been an important topic of subjective debate, with district maps having consequences to multiple stakeholders. Even though districting as an optimization problem has been well-studied, existing models primarily rely on non-political fairness measures such as the compactness of districts. This paper introduces optimization models for districting with political fairness criteria. The criteria considered are based on fundamental fairness principles such as vote-seat proportionality (efficiency gap), partisan (a)symmetry, and competitiveness. Given the large sizes of practical instances, a multilevel algorithm is presented, which first reduces instance sizes by a series of graph contractions, and then solves an exact multi-objective problem at the inner level using the −constraint method. The non-linearity of the partisan asymmetry objective is efficiently tackled with the branch-and-cut method. Case studies on congressional districting in Wisconsin are presented. The results demonstrate that district plans constituting the Pareto-front are equitable, symmetric, competitive, and compact, and that a multi-objective approach is integral to paving the way towards a holistic districting process that addresses all the stakeholders.


Distinct male and female patterns of pituitary GH secretion produce sexually differentiated hepatic gene expression profiles, thereby influencing steroid and xenobiotic metabolism. We used a fully automated system to obtain serial nocturnal blood samples every 15 minutes from cannulated wild-type (WT) and somatostatin knockout (Sst-KO) mice to determine the role of SST, the principal inhibitor of GH release, in the generation of sexually dimorphic GH pulsatility. WT males had lower mean and median GH values, less random GH secretory bursts, and longer trough periods between GH pulses than WT females. Each of these parameters was feminized in male Sst-KO mice, whereas female Sst-KO mice had higher GH levels than all other groups, but GH pulsatility was unaffected. We next performed hepatic mRNA profiling with high-density microarrays. Male Sst-KO mice exhibited a globally feminized pattern of GH-dependent mRNA levels, but female Sst-KO mice were largely unaffected. Among the differentially expressed female-predominant genes was Serpina6, which encodes corticosteroid-binding globulin (CBG). Increased CBG was associated with elevated diurnal peak plasma corticosterone in unstressed WT females and both sexes of Sst-KO mice compared with WT males. Sst-KO mice also had exaggerated ACTH and corticosterone responses to acute restraint stress. However, consistent with their lack of phenotypic signs of excess glucocorticoids, cerebrospinal fluid concentrations of free corticosterone in Sst-KO mice were not elevated. In summary, SST is necessary for the prolonged interpulse troughs that define masculinized pituitary GH secretion. SST also contributes to sexual dimorphism of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis via GH-dependent regulation of hepatic CBG production.


Background
Laparoscopic colectomy (LC) presents similar short-term results and oncological outcomes to conventional colectomy (CC) in colon cancer.

Objectives
Compare short-term and oncological outcomes at 3-year follow up between LC and CC.

Materials and methods
Patients who underwent LC and CC for colon cancer between January 2010 and December 2017 were retrospectively analyzed. Short-term results and oncological outcomes were studied.

Results
Two hundred sixty-nine patients were included in the study. CC was performed in 37.5% and LC in 62.5%. LC presented shorter operative time (157 vs. 175 min, p = 0.01), shorter length of stay (8.4 vs. 10.5 days, p = 0.02), lees readmission (6% vs. 15%, p = 0.02), and lower morbidity (40% vs. 56%, p = 0.01). No differences were found for overall survival (OAS) (LC = 87.1% vs. CC = 82.8%, p = 0.28) and disease-free survival (DFS) (LC = 78.2% vs. CC = 75.3%, p = 0.47). Recurrence was observed in 37 patients (LC = 16.1% vs. CC = 18.3%, p = 0.53). No differences were found for local recurrence (LC = 6.5% vs. CC = 8.6%, p = 0.49) and distant recurrence (LC = 12.1% vs. CC = 16.1%, p = 0.3). Stage analysis showed no difference for recurrence, OAS, and DFS.

Conclusions
LC is a safe procedure with short-term outcomes, OAS, DFS, and recurrence similar to CC. LC should be the initial indication in non-metastatic colon cancer in our population.


Receptor interacting protein kinase 3 (RIPK3) can activate and be activated by ER stress. Islet inflammation associated with underlying activation of RIPK3 is conserved from zebrafish to humans. However, the role of RIPK3 in mammalian beta cells and the mechanism by which ER stress activates RIPK3 are not well defined. To investigate the role of RIPK3 in beta cell function, we generated beta cell specific Ripk3 knockout mice (Ripk3ßKO) in C57BL/6J background with or without the Akita mutation (Ins2C96Y/+, which causes ER stress induced beta cell apoptosis and early onset diabetes) (Ripk3ßKOAkita) . We found that the glucose tolerance was worsened in Ripk3ßKO mice than wildtype controls after 16 weeks of high fat diet. Similarly, Ripk3ßKOAkita mice had higher random blood glucose, lower circulating insulin, and worse glucose tolerance than Akita C57BL/6J mice as early as 4 weeks of age. Unexpectedly, isolated islets from Ripk3ßKO and Ripk3ßKOAkita mice have comparable glucose stimulated insulin secretion (GSIS) and are more resilient to palmitate-induced lipotoxicity than their control counterparts. Similarly, pharmacological inhibition of RIPK3 protected human islets from palmitate-induced impairment of GSIS ex vivo. We are currently investigating the role of specific islet inflammation stages in the divergent GSIS phenotypes between in vivo and ex vivo. To investigate how ER stress activates RIPK3 in beta cells, we tested the effect of inhibiting classic UPR branches on RIPK3 activation in MIN6 cells, a mouse beta cell line. We found that IRE1a activation appears to play an essential role in RIPK3 activation. Interestingly, Ripk3 knockdown in MIN6 cells also decreased IRE1a levels. We next seek to define the mechanism underlying the crosstalk between RIPK3 and IRE1a signaling pathways.

 L.Yang: None. B.Yang: None. X.Tong: None. C.Dai: None. Z.Tang: None. W.Chen: None.

 National Institutes of Health (DK117147)


Hearing loss and tinnitus during fluvoxamine treatment: a case report Fluvoxamine is a widely prescribed selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI). Although it is known that serotonin constitutes an important network in the hearing process and there are recent studies investigating the effects of serotonin and SSRI's on the auditory functions, its exact role is not well characterized. In this paper we present a case with hearing loss and tinnitus which developed during fluvoxamine treatment and disappeared after discontinuation of fluvoxamine. A 54-year-old female patient with major depression had complaints about tinnitus and hearing loss in her right ear during fluvoxamine treatment. There were no significant abnormalities in her medical history, she was not taking any other medications, and ear-nose-throat examination was within normal limits. Audiometry revealed mixed hearing loss and transient otoacoustic emission (TOAE) recordings revealed a low reproducibility and low signal to noise ratio in the right ear. The control investigations after discontinuation of fluvoxamine revealed that the auditory functions were restored. The hearing loss in our patient might be due to the interference of fluvoxamine with facial nerve functioning or the effects of serotonin on the auditory sensorineural transmission. This case was considered to be noteworthy to publish, in order to increase clinicians' awareness of the possible side effects of SSRI's on the auditory functions.


Metallothioneins (MTs) are low-molecular-weight, cysteine-rich proteins believed to play a role in cytosolic zinc (Zn) and copper (Cu) homeostasis. However, evidence for the functional properties of MTs has been hampered by methodological problems in the isolation and characterization of the proteins. Here, we document that barley (Hordeum vulgare) MT3 and MT4 proteins exist in planta and that they differ in tissue localization as well as in metal coordination chemistry. Combined transcriptional and histological analyses showed temporal and spatial correlations between transcript levels and protein abundance during grain development. MT3 was present in tissues of both maternal and filial origin throughout grain filling. In contrast, MT4 was confined to the embryo and aleurone layer, where it appeared during tissue specialization and remained until maturity. Using state-of-the-art speciation analysis by size-exclusion chromatography inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry and electrospray ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometry on recombinant MT3 and MT4, their specificity and capacity for metal ion binding were quantified, showing a strong preferential Zn binding relative to Cu and cadmium (Cd) in MT4, which was not the case for MT3. When complementary DNAs from barley MTs were expressed in Cuor Cd-sensitive yeast mutants, MT3 provided a much stronger complementation than did MT4. We conclude that MT3 may play a housekeeping role in metal homeostasis, while MT4 may function in Zn storage in developing and mature grains. The localization of MT4 and its discrimination against Cd make it an ideal candidate for future biofortification strategies directed toward increasing food and feed Zn concentrations.


Mathematics Teacher Preparation Programs increasingly include a focus on the use of technology for teaching school mathematics. A key feature in this approach to prepare teachers to teach mathematics with technology is to integrally develop teachers' TPSM. Teachers need to understand that critical instructional decisions they make are grounded in their understandings of each domain (technology, pedagogy, and School Mathematics) and influenced by their beliefs and conceptions. The main professional course in (SQU: Sultan Qaboos University) mathematics teachers program focus on the potential integration of three domains TPSM to prepare new teachers.


Abstract  By critically analysing recent explorations into walking the city as a creative and politicised practice, this paper illustrates how mobile devices can be used as tools for radical play and to encourage subversive use of public spaces. Building on Henri Lefebrve's Writings on Cities (1993) and The Urban Revolution, (2003) this paper will offer new types of technologised mapping as a politicised performative practice that enacts participants 'right to the city'. Australian performance group pvi collective's recent piece Deviator,(2012) sited in Glasgow and other international cities, demands a subversive re-coding of the city via a technological derive, live performance and play. By positioning audiences as interventionists on the streets and encouraging a deviation from the norm the social codes of the city are reimagined and participant-spectators encounter potentially transformative interactions with public spaces.


Searching for information about a specific person is an online activity frequently performed by many users. In most cases, users are aided by queries containing a name and sending back to the web search engines for finding their will. Typically, Web search engines provide just a few accurate results associated with a name-containing query. Currently, most solutions for suggesting synonyms in online search are based on pattern matching and phonetic encoding, however very often, the performance of such solutions is less than optimal. In this paper, we propose SpokenName2Vec, a novel and generic approach which addresses the similar name suggestion problem by utilizing automated speech generation, and deep learning to produce spoken name embeddings. This sophisticated and innovative embeddings captures the way people pronounce names in any language and accent. Utilizing the name pronunciation can be helpful for both differentiating and detecting names that sound alike, but are written differently. The proposed approach was demonstrated on a large-scale dataset consisting of 250,000 forenames and evaluated using a machine learning classifier and 7,399 names with their verified synonyms. The performance of the proposed approach was found to be superior to 10 other algorithms evaluated in this study, including well used phonetic and string similarity algorithms, and two recently proposed algorithms. The results obtained suggest that the proposed approach could serve as a useful and valuable tool for solving the similar name suggestion problem.


Electronic trade platforms support trading transactions between enterprises. They have entered the business landscape including the agri-food sector only a few years ago. However, there already have been dramatic changes in the agri-food sector's platform infrastructures. This paper analyzes developments in electronic trade platform infrastructures in the agri-food sector of the US and Europe between 2000 and 2002 and identifies development strategies of successful platforms. Of 85 platforms in existence in the year 2000, only 25 remained active in 2002. But there are still market entries of new platforms and existing platforms form various types of partnerships. The analysis could identify a range of strategic development lines of successful platforms. Initiating cooperation with other platforms on the use of specific features and the development and use of standards, gaining support by major market participants, the improvement of trading functionalities and the expansion of value-added services are the primary lines of development and evolvement of platforms. Platform evolvement tendencies and the present occurrence of the trade platform infrastructure allow for projecting the emergence of an agri-food sector with embedded, interconnected e-commerce infrastructure or mega-hub leading towards a more networked agri-food industry.


Soil erosion is one of the most serious problems challenging the wellbeing of the human beings and environmental sustainability. In developing countries like Rwanda, in order to combat soil erosion, conservation practices should be implemented. This research evaluated the technical conformity and cost effectiveness of bench terraces in Rwanda. The Eastern Province of Rwanda was selected for this study as it is the largest, and has a combination of the most populous and the least densely populated areas and compares well with other five provinces. This province experiences insufficient rainfall and serious erosion problems because of its hilly nature and frequent rainstorms. The technical standards and models provided by MINAGRI and FAO were tested on 180 terraces taken as a sample against the current terracing practice. The results showed that many sites have been constructed without consideration of the technical guidelines. In fact, some land slopes are below the 10.7% standards; others are above 44% instead of 15-40% and slope risers of 90% and height of 2.9m. The correlation between vertical interval measured on the field and vertical interval given by FAO formula indicated weak correlation (r=0.314; P<0.01) and very weak correlation between width measured on the field and width given by FAO formula (0.194;P<0,05). Furthermore, some plots have been abandoned and used as pastures and some farmers destroyed the embankment for increasing the cultivable area. The benefit analysis showed that whether farmers use all agricultural technology of farming management the terraces can be economically benefit in second year with 1.15 BCR. Farmers' preferences were investigated through pair-wise ranking approach. The farmers ranked the increasing fodder and soil erosion control at the first rank. If no remedial measures are taken soon to some terraces, landslides and erosion will be carrying more soil than before the construction of bench terraces. The remaining subsoil will not suitable for growing crops; and the increase in agriculture productivity, which was a target while implementing bench terraces will not be met. Therefore, special emphasis should be placed on it by increasing the supervision of implementation on field. MINAGRI should make its effort on construction of them during and after even should continue the monitoring and evaluation till at least 5 years and handover with both implementers and farmers.


Low pressure turbines in aircraft experience large changes in flow Reynolds number as the gas turbine engine operates from takeoff to high altitude cruise. Low pressure turbine blades are also subject to regions of strong acceleration and diffusion. These changes in Reynolds number, strong acceleration, as well as elevated levels of turbulence can result in unsteady separation and transition zones on the surface of the blade.An experimental study was conducted in a two-dimensional linear cascade, focusing on the suction surface of a low pressure turbine blade. The intent was to assess the effects of changes in Reynolds number, and freestream turbulence intensity. Flow Reynolds numbers, based on exit velocity and suction surface length, have been varied from 50,000 to 300,000. The freestream turbulence intensity was varied from 1.1 to 8.1 percent.Separation was observed at all test Reynolds numbers. Increasing the flow Reynolds number, without changing freestream turbulence, resulted in a slightly rearward movement of the onset of separation and shrinkage of the separation zone.Increasing the freestream turbulence intensity, without changing Reynolds number resulted in a shrinkage of the separation region on the suction surface.Increasing both flow Reynolds numbers and freestream turbulence intensity compounded these effects such that at a Reynolds number of 300,000 and a freestream turbulence intensity of 8.1%, the separation zone was almost nonexistent.The influences on the blade's wake from altering freestream turbulence and Reynolds number are also documented. The width of the wake and velocity defect rise with a decrease in either turbulence level or chord Reynolds number.Numerical simulations were performed in support of experimental results. The numerical results compare well qualitatively with the low freestream turbulence experimental cases.Copyright © 1997 by ASME


Antibodies prepared in rabbits against the major allergen from ryegrass (Lolium perenne), Lol p I, cross-reacted with the cysteine proteinase bromelain from pineapple and vice versa. Deglycosylation of the proteins showed that the cross-reaction was based on recognition of the carbohydrate moiety of the allergen, but for bromelain the cross-reaction was most likely due to a combination of factors. The results indicate that the carbohydrate residues from these allergens play an important role in cross-reactions found between them and possibly those from other species.


The purpose of this book is to remove the veil of secrecy surrounding SAP upgrade techniques and concepts, and to provide the user with a detailed description of the steps needed for a successful implementation. Today more than 12 million people in 120 countries who are working for 36,200 companies are using SAP on a regular basis. This popular, but very complex software system must be constantly reconfigured and upgraded to accommodate its latest releases. This book provides a complete overview of the process to upgrade from one SAP release to the next one and explains with detailed descriptions, the use of all relevant SAP upgrade tools. Along with a technical description of the SAP NetWeaver Application Server (AS), it also discusses personnel issues and the economic ramifications of such an upgrade project. Examples in this book are based on various different SAP products and releases, such as SAP NetWeaver 2004, 2004S (also known as NetWeaver 7.0 and 7.1), and SAP Business Suite 2005 with SAP ERP 6.0, BI, CRM, SCM, and SRM. Conceived as both a teaching book and as a reference manual, it covers all the techniques, background information, notes, tips, and tricks needed for any SAP upgrade project. A CD-ROM accompanies the book with templates and outlines for the upgrading process, as well as third-party SAP-related material.


The accurate clinical diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease can only be made with a high degree of certainty in specialized centres. The identification of predictive or diagnostic genetic factors may improve accuracy of disease prediction or diagnosis. One major genetic risk factor, the epsilon4 allele of the apolipoprotein E gene, is universally recognised. We have recently shown that the A allele of the apolipoprotein E, -491A/T promoter polymorphism is also an important risk factor for Alzheimer's disease in an Australian population. We designed the present study to investigate the association between apolipoprotein E genotype, -491A/T polymorphism, plasma apoE levels and the subjective experience of memory decline among 98 subjects and 49 age, gender and education-matched normal controls. An increased frequency of the epsilon4 allele of apolipoprotein E was significantly associated with the 'memory complainers' group (OR = 2.35, P = 0.02) as was the A allele of the -491A/T polymorphism (OR = 2, P = 0.02). Among all subjects, only seven individuals were homozygous for both of these alleles, and six of these seven individuals belonged to the 'memory complainers' group. This sub-group also had relatively elevated plasma apolipoprotein E levels (P < 0.01) and tended to score lower on the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) and Cambridge Cognition Test. These data suggest that the epsilon4 allele of apolipoprotein E and the -491A allele are over-represented among individuals who complain of memory difficulties. Follow-up studies should clarify whether these genotypes and phenotypes are useful in the prediction and/or diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease.


TO THE EDITOR: Dr. Thomas Lansdale's provocative essay "A medical center is not a hospital" (September 2008) is, in many respects, on target. I share some of Dr. Lansdale's disenchantment, but only some. Our profession is under the gun, and everyone expects more of us. But change is the fabric of life and gives us opportunities to advance our profession and alter the fate of our patients. And I haven't changed in one respect: I am still a "hospital guy" and I still am having fun. The pressures faced in practicing medicine are enormous. Simply put, when medicine needs a sophisticated environment such as a hospital, we need to figure out how to meet the mortgage. This is a problem when hospital managers are not physicians and are not at the bedside enough. Their charge is different. My former chief operations officer (an MBA) used to jokingly say, "They (meaning the academic full-time Cleveland Clinic staff ) just don't get it." And I would say, "They (meaning the MBA management crew) just don't get it." Well, neither group usually does. They can't. They are of different worlds—until the MBA gets sick with crushing chest pain or the physician-manager suddenly has to face the music of a Wall Street bond collapse. We can complain all we want, but we exist in a world of profit margin and EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization). The challenge is to preserve the bottom line while also protecting physician time for reasonable research and education programs. I happen to share Dr. Lansdale's love for diagnostic challenges presented by hospitalized patients. My specialty (advanced heart failure and cardiac transplantation) certainly remains exciting and challenging because of this. And I cannot do what I do without a hospital—no heart transplants on my kitchen table! Let's get real: for many of us the hospital is still the only place we can practice and the only place we can save lives and alter the often-dismal prognosis of our most ill patients. Yes, our practice has changed. We no longer strain to see a glossy wet Polaroid of an m-mode echo to diagnose mitral stenosis, and we no longer have only lidocaine and a prayer for acute myocardial infarction. We don't do our own Gram stains, urinalyses, and peripheral blood smears in the middle of the night, and AIDS is no longer called "thinman disease." And what about safety of hospitals? Well, don't forget history. Hospitals are no longer death houses. Hospital safety and clinical outcomes have never been better. Yes, they are not yet good enough, and egregious problems exist, but never before has so much attention and expense been paid to quality improvement, patient experience, and safety initiatives throughout the industry. No, hospitals are not perfect—never will be. But I am proud of what we are doing, what we have accomplished, and what we will accomplish in the future to make ill patients better when they are sick enough to require hospitalization. So I am proud and happy to be a hospital guy. To Dr. Lansdale I say, don't give up. Your effort to preserve the passion of our noble profession is essential. Oh, and remember that Osler of Baltimore struggled with the same issues as did Codman of Boston. The more things change, the more they stay the same— except for the fact that hospitals are better.


Continuous theta burst stimulation (cTBS) applied over the primary motor cortex (M1) can alleviate pain although the neural basis of this effect remains largely unknown. Besides, the primary somatosensory cortex (S1) is thought to play a pivotal role in the sensori-discriminative aspects of pain perception but the analgesic effect of cTBS applied over S1 remains controversial. To investigate cTBS-induced analgesia we characterized, in two separate experiments, the effect of cTBS applied either over M1 or S1 on the event-related brain potentials (ERPs) and perception elicited by nociceptive (CO2 laser stimulation) and non-nociceptive (transcutaneous electrical stimulation) somatosensory stimuli. All stimuli were delivered to the ipsilateral and contralateral hand. We found that both cTBS applied over M1 and cTBS applied over S1 significantly reduced the percept elicited by nociceptive stimuli delivered to the contralateral hand as compared to similar stimulation of the ipsilateral hand. In contrast, cTBS did not modulate the perception of non-nociceptive stimuli. Surprisingly, this side-dependent analgesic effect of cTBS was not reflected in the amplitude modulation of nociceptive ERPs. Indeed, both nociceptive (N160, N240 and P360 waves) and late-latency non-nociceptive (N140 and P200 waves) ERPs elicited by stimulation of the contralateral and ipsilateral hands were similarly reduced after cTBS, suggesting an unspecific effect, possibly due to habituation or reduced alertness. In conclusion, cTBS applied over M1 and S1 reduces similarly the perception of nociceptive inputs originating from the contralateral hand, but this analgesic effect is not reflected in the magnitude of nociceptive ERPs.


We propose a flexible gradient-based framework for learning linear programs from optimal decisions. Linear programs are often specified by hand, using prior knowledge of relevant costs and constraints. In some applications, linear programs must instead be learned from observations of optimal decisions. Learning from optimal decisions is a particularly challenging bi-level problem, and much of the related inverse optimization literature is dedicated to special cases. We tackle the general problem, learning all parameters jointly while allowing flexible parametrizations of costs, constraints, and loss functions. We also address challenges specific to learning linear programs, such as empty feasible regions and non-unique optimal decisions. Experiments show that our method successfully learns synthetic linear programs and minimum-cost multi-commodity flow instances for which previous methods are not directly applicable. We also provide a fast batch-mode PyTorch implementation of the homogeneous interior point algorithm, which supports gradients by implicit differentiation or backpropagation.


Development that is sustainable requires an operational, efficient and safe transportation system fueled by clean, low carbon, secure and affordable energy. The energy used in road passenger transport enables social and economic development and is the target of interventions to fight pressing urban environmental problems, energy security concerns and dangerous climate change. This review explores a systematic approach to describe interactions documented in the literature, between policies targeting energy use in road passenger transport to reduce petroleum consumption and greenhouse gas emissions and sustainable development goals. Essential, uncertain and limited interactions are mapped out as a result, their overview indicates that a full reconciliation between these policies and sustainability goals is not always attainable. The careful alignment and contextual examination of interactions between measures and goals as exemplified in this approach can help inform practical transport energy policy that better match an agenda for sustainable development.


The effects of hemodialysis, bilateral nephrectomy, and renal homotransplantation were evaluated in 12 patients with renal failure due to primary malignant hypertension. The blood pressure was difficult to control with hemodialysis, moderately high doses of antihypertensives, and dietary restriction. Bilateral nephrectomy resulted in significant reduction of diastolic blood pressure and reduction in the number and quantities of antihypertensive medication. Fourteen renal homografts were performed. Patient survival and transplant function compare favorably with other patients transplanted by us and those reported to the Human Transplant Registry. In the posttransplant period, hypertension was a problem in only two patients. The mean diastolic blood pressure was similar to that achieved by bilateral nephrectomy. Renal transplantation is an acceptable therapy for patients who have been treated by bilateral nephrectomy for malignant nephrosclerosis.


Stream ecology is undergoing a transition from ecosystem to landscape science. This change is reflected in many studies; work at Sycamore Creek in Arizona will be used to illustrate the challenges of this transition and several applications. Conceptual challenges involve clear determination of the organization of research objectives. Ecosystem science is largely concerned with how things work while landscape ecology focuses on the influence of spatial pattern and heterogeneity on system functioning. Questions of system scale, hierarchical structure, dimensionality, and currency must be resolved in order to productively execute research objectives. The new stream ecology is more integrative, more realistic spatially, deals with streams at a larger scale, and treats them as branched system more than former approaches. At Sycamore Creek, studies of sand bar patches and their influence on organisms and nutrient cycling illustrate how variations in patch shape and configuration can alter system outputs. Beyond sandbars, inclusion of riparian zones as integral parts of streams produces a more coherent view of nutrient dynamics than previous studies that began at the water´s edge. Integration of streams with the landscape they drain requires that streams be viewed as branched structures, not linear systems. This view in ecology is in its infancy but it provides an opportunity to identify processing hot spots along flow paths and to reveal presumptive effects of climate change in terms of spatial shifts in biogeochemical activity rather than black-box rate changes.