Millennials are now the largest generation in the United States, and they are the most likely to identify as liberal Democrats. Their access to the ballot has become a political and legal flashpoint, with a growing number of young people arguing that Republican-dominated state legislatures have enacted voter restrictions deliberately to suppress their vote. This article focuses on legal challenges to state voting laws based on the Twenty-Sixth Amendment, which lowered the minimum voting age from twenty-one to eighteen. These are novel claims and courts have struggled with how to interpret the Amendment. I argue that the Twenty-Sixth Amendment, as an analogue to the Fifteenth Amendment, prohibits intentional voter discrimination on the basis of age. As I demonstrate, the federal courts that have heard these claims are haltingly moving towards this same interpretation. However, I offer a newly strong theoretical basis for reading the Twenty-Sixth Amendment this way by emphasizing the Amendment's text rather than its history. I also suggest that demographic changes in the United States are blurring the line between voter discrimination based on age and that based on race.


B4C/CNTs and B4C/Ccomposites were prepared by reaction-sintering technique. The density and porosity of the samples were determined and three-points bending strengths of the composites were measured. Wear resistance tests were performed using a HT-500 pin-on-disc tribometer with the sample placed horizontally on a turning table. The morphology of the worn surfaces and fracture of the composites were examined by means of scanning electron microscopy so as to explore the wear mechanisms. The results indicate that B4C/CNTs composites show improved friction and wear properties as compared with B4C/C composites. It is found that CNTs in the specimens play important role in improving the wear properties of the composites. The wear mechanism of the B4C/CNTs composites is characterized by micro-cutting and plowing at ambient temperature, and sub-surface cracking and the resultant localized spalling on the worn surface at the temperatures higher than 500°C.


Superconducting RFQs (SRFQs), the first SC RFQs ever made operational for users, have been operated on the PIAVE SC heavy ion linac injector at INFN-Legnaro since 2006. The structure is split into two resonators and is limited to the accelerating RFQ sections. The resonators had never exceeded 80% of the design accelerating fields. In 2015, an upgrade plan started, aimed at increasing the accelerating fields, while improving their slow and fast tuning systems, repairing degraded components, implementing a LASER alignment method. The upgrade plan was successfully concluded in summer 2017. The resonators were kept stably locked for days at a field larger than the nominal one. Eventually, a test beam was accelerated successfully for 72 hours, with negligible locking issues. SRFQs entered once again routine operation in December 2017. The new features will allow to accelerate heavy ions with an A/q value as high as 8.5 (versus a former maximum A/q = 7.5), allowing operation of the very first accelerated uranium beams at INFN-LNL, after the related authorizations shall have been issued.


The visual world naturally exhibits a long-tailed distribution of open classes, which poses great challenges to modern visual systems. Existing approaches either perform class re-balancing strategies or directly improve network modules to address the problem. However, they still train models with a finite set of predefined labels, limiting their supervision information and restricting their transferability to novel instances. Recent advances in large-scale contrastive visual-language pretraining shed light on a new pathway for visual recognition. With open-vocabulary supervisions, pretrained contrastive vision-language models learn powerful multimodal representations that are promising to handle data deficiency and unseen concepts. By calculating the semantic similarity between visual and text inputs, visual recognition is converted to a vision-language matching problem. Inspired by this, we propose BALLAD to leverage contrastive vision-language models for long-tailed recognition. We first continue pretraining the vision-language backbone through contrastive learning on a specific long-tailed target dataset. Afterward, we freeze the backbone and further employ an additional adapter layer to enhance the representations of tail classes on balanced training samples built with re-sampling strategies. Extensive experiments have been conducted on three popular long-tailed recognition benchmarks. As a result, our simple and effective approach sets the new state-of-the-art performances and outperforms competitive baselines with a large margin. Code is released at https://github.com/gaopengcuhk/BALLAD.


Flood frequency analysis has been an important tool to estimate design floods which are essential for flood protection and management. Series of maximum annual flows MAF have been the preferred choice to collect the needed sample of high flow events for parameter estimation of the identified statistical models. However, MAF series can be short as it is restricted to the available years of record, and ignores significant high flow events, as it selects the highest for each year. Partial duration series of high flows (PDF) consist of high flows above a pre-defined threshold, and it will include all significant high events above this threshold. Moreover, PDF series can be much longer than the MAF series, as more than one event can be selected per year. Two major concerns are usually connected to the PDF series: the first is the value for the threshold which will affect the size of the series, and the second is the transformation of return periods corresponding to design floods from the PDF domain to the annual domain. A new formula has been derived to transform the return periods from the PDF domain to the annual domain, and results of this new formula have been compared to the commonly used one in the literature. The new formula, which is based on the binomial process, only requires the independence of the flood events, and produces more realistic and reliable values compared to the one available in the literature, which assumes a Poisson distribution for floods above the threshold. Hourly flow series for the Leith (46 years) and the Tokomairiro (21 years, will be referred to as Toko) Rivers in Otago, NZ have been collected from the Otago Regional Council in Dunedin. Independent flood events above several thresholds for both rivers have been identified, along with the maximum annual flows. The cumulative distribution function (CDF) of the PDF series was compared to the CDF of the MAF series for both rivers and has shown the improvement due to smoother and more consistent CDF, which will impact on the ability of any statistical model to simulate these series. Several competitive statistical models, including the Gumbel, GEV and the GP models have been fitted and tested to the MAF series and PDF series (with different sizes) of the Leith and Toko Rivers. The GP model outperformed other models, and thus it was the choice for this study. Model application and testing have shown that fitting the GP model to the PDF series outperformed the MAF series, and resulted in much more reliable model for the simulation of the flood events of these rivers. Testing criteria was based on comparison of the historical and modelled (produced by the model) CDF and histograms, in addition to Kolmogorov Smirnov goodness of fit test, Chi 2 goodness of fit test and Filliben correlation coefficient. In general, increasing the number of flood events in the PDF series improved the goodness of fit for the fitted GP model for the Toko River, but was limited to an arrival rate (λ) of 4 for the Leith high flows. Thus, a thorough testing for several arrival rates, corresponding to different thresholds, should be carried out for the choice of the best threshold for the PDF series. Study of the impact of the size of the PDF series (bigger λ ) on design floods indicated that, in general, their values will increase with increasing λ. However, the optimum value for λ does not have to be the highest, as was the case for the Leith River.


: Under the label of social phobia a complex of ailments was introduced into the syndromal diagnostic classification system of ICD-10 and DSM-IV, which is characterized by fear of embarrassing and humiliating experiences in relation to other persons. According to our experiences, however, social phobias and other problems in interpersonal relations are not yet paid the clinical attention that these problems deserve, when the severity of impairments subjects affected by social phobias suffer from is taken into account. There is a considerable lack of research of the psychodynamic aspects of social phobia as well. For this reason, we studied the frequency and extent of social anxieties in a sample of patients requiring psychiatric-psychotherapeutic inpatient treatment suffering from social anxieties (N = 930). This sample was compared to another sample of patients without social anxieties. We applied standardized diagnostic and psychometric instruments in order to collect information about anamnestic and social data as well as data about symptom severity, interpersonal impairments and comorbid disorders. The results do not only show the high frequency of social anxieties (45 %), but also the severe impairments in various domains of personal functioning of patients suffering from social anxieties compared to the patients without severe social anxieties. According to our clinical experiences and to the results presented here, the construct of social phobia as it is currently used in the psychiatric classification systems is an syndromal additive description that falls short of a form of suffering that is characterized by the facts that it is interwoven with the complete social existence of an affected person. For this reason, the term social phobia should be replaced by the more appropriate term of social anxiety.


Within the last thirty years, Kansei studies have become an important field of research in Japan. More recently, foreign researchers have become more and more interested in understating the approach, despite the difficulties related to the cultural dimension of Kansei and Kansei studies. The aim of this research is to propose to westerners a clear description of what Kansei and Kansei studies are, and how it is different from classic western approaches on sensory or emotion design. Using this description of Kansei studies, a brainstorming has been organized to determine a list of keywords (KSK) used to structure and map comprehensively Kansei-related source of information. Moreover, a participative tool, called KanseiTako, is introduced. This tool aims at providing researchers, educators, and students, with an organized and useful set of knowledge sources to structure comprehensively the research field and the education in Kansei studies.


Adenosine receptors are largely distributed in our organism and are promising therapeutic targets for the treatment of many pathologies. In this perspective, investigating the structural features of the ligands leading to affinity and/or selectivity is of great interest. In this work, we have focused on a small series of pyrazolo-triazolo-pyrimidine antagonists substituted in positions 2, 5, and N8, where bulky acyl moieties at the N5 position and small alkyl groups at the N8 position are associated with affinity and selectivity at the A3 adenosine receptor even if a good affinity toward the A2B adenosine receptor has also been observed. Conversely, a free amino function at the 5 position induces high affinity at the A2A and A1 receptors with selectivity vs. the A3 subtype. A molecular modeling study suggests that differences in affinity toward A1, A2A, and A3 receptors could be ascribed to two residues: one in the EL2, E168 in human A2A/E172 in human A1, that is occupied by the hydrophobic residue V169 in the human A3 receptor; and the other in TM6, occupied by H250/H251 in human A2A and A1 receptors and by a less bulky S247 in the A3 receptor. In the end, these findings could help to design new subtype-selective adenosine receptor ligands.


The present study evaluated the impact that orchiectomy, a routine but painful intervention in bovine husbandry, can cause on pulmonary immunity. To identify whether orchiectomy can impair lung defense, analyses of serum cortisol concentration and of alveolar macrophage and their function (phagocytosis and respiratory burst) were evaluated. Sixteen Holstein bulls (7 mo old, 250±50kg of body weight BW) were divided in two homogeneous groups – the castrated group and the sham group – and the sample were collected on Days -7, 1 and 7 relative to the day of the procedure. Serum cortisol concentration statistically increased on Days 1 and 7 (D-7: 4,97±1,28ng/ml; D1: 6,35 ±1,10ng/ml; D7: 8,28±1,94ng/ml) after castration and these variables seem to impact the alveolar macrophage percentage on D1 (D-7: 76,86±3,44%; D1: 60,92±2,44%; D7: 74,17±2,56%) and their respective function of phagocytosis (P) and the oxidative burst (OB) on Days 1 and 7 for the castrated group (P D-7: 56,25±15,63 arbitrary values; D1: 54,75±14,07 arbitrary values; D7: 31,77±8,44 arbitrary values; and OB D-7: 222,34±39,52 arbitrary values; D1: 135,25±37,68 arbitrary values; D7: 117,73±18,17 arbitrary values). These results indicate that surgical castration affected lung defense until seven days after the practice, so the pulmonary cell function was impaired for a period higher than that reported


Estimation of time-varying parameters via local polynomial approximations in linearly parameterized systems is considered. A strategy for approximating a time-varying parameter locally by a polynomial is given. The estimation time divided into small intervals; in each interval the time-varying parameter is approximated by a time polynomial with unknown constant coefficients. A condition for resetting the parameter estimate at the beginning of each interval is derived; the condition ensures that the estimate of the time-varying parameter is continuous and allows for the coefficients of the polynomial to be different in various time intervals. Modifications of the least-squares and the gradient algorithms are provided to estimate the time-varying parameters. Stability of the proposed algorithms is shown and discussed. Simulation results on an example are given.


With the rapid development of national e-commerce economy in China, logistics has gained more high speed of development and abstracted more attentions as "the third profit source". Large-scale production companies and commercial enterprise have set up their own distribution center. The development of the traffic logistics has brought more efficiency of commodity circulation along with some social problem such as resources wastage, traffic safety, environmental pollution and the unloaded motor vehicle rate increase. This paper mainly described the Governmentpsilas Traffic Department how to act as "the third-party logistics" in order to improve their service quality and their service level. Constructing a traffic logistics Website, which makes the vehicle owners and the goods owners to share their information online and effectively reduce the rate of unloaded motor vehicles, and also promote the change of the government's service from the delivery model to the service-oriented one. This paper not only describes various functional modules of system, but also describes the system's core technology. Especially, it used the greedy-backtracking algorithm that is applied to matching subsystem of the vehicles and the goods well. At present, the system has been supported and appraised by the Traffic Department of the Jiangxi Provincial Government and other relevant departments, and has fairly good promotional value in Jiangxi Province and other regions.


Objectives: The aim of this review is to summarize the evidence available about the association between sugar consumption, especially sucrose, and the risk of different types of cancer. Methods: A systematic review was conducted of key reports, systematic reviews, meta-analysis as well as big prospective studies published after 2007 January 1 thru 2012 December 31 about the association between sugar consumption, especially sucrose, and the risk of cancer. Results: Evidence of the association of the intake of mono- and disaccharides with different types of cancer is insufficient or there is evidence of lack of association. There is only possible evidence of a positive relation between the intake of monosaccharides (fructose and glucose) and pancreatic cancer. Evidence about the association between monosaccharides' intake and obesity is insufficient, as well as between the intake of sucrose or added sugars and the risk of obesity in adults and children. There is possible evidence of a positive association between glycemic index (GI) and colorectal cancer and that there is no association between GI and the risk of endometrial cancer, breast cancer and pancreas cancer. Conclusion: More research is needed. Cohort studies are especially required and randomized intervention trials would be desirable, although these are difficult in this field.


Survivors of preterm birth have a high incidence of neurodevelopmental impairment which is not explained by currently understood brain abnormalities. The aim of this study was to test the hypothesis that the neurodevelopmental abilities of 2-year-old children who were born preterm and who had no evidence of focal abnormality on conventional MR imaging were consistently linearly related to specific local changes in white matter microstructure. We studied 33 children, born at a median (range) gestational age of 28(+5) (24(+4)-32(+1)) weeks. The children were recruited as infants from the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at Queen Charlotte's and Hammersmith Hospital in the early neonatal period and imaged at a median corrected age of 25.5 (24-27) months. The children underwent diffusion tensor imaging to measure fractional anisotropy (FA) as a measure of tissue microstructure, and neurodevelopmental assessment using the Griffiths Mental Development Scales [giving an overall developmental quotient (DQ) and sub-quotients scores for motor, personal-social, hearing-language, eye-hand coordination and performance scales] at 2 years corrected age. Tract-based spatial statistics with linear regression analysis of voxel-wise cross-subject statistics were used to assess the relationship between FA and DQ/sub-quotient scores and results confirmed by reduced major axis regression of regions with significant correlations. We found that DQ was linearly related to FA values in parts of the corpus callosum; performance sub-scores to FA values in the corpus callosum and right cingulum; and eye-hand coordination sub-scores to FA values in the cingulum, fornix, anterior commissure, corpus callosum and right uncinate fasciculus. This study shows that specific neurodevelopmental impairments in infants born preterm are precisely related to microstructural abnormalities in particular regions of cerebral white matter which are consistent between individuals. FA may aid prognostication and provide a biomarker for therapeutic or mechanistic studies of preterm brain injury.


Modeling visual saliency map of an image provides important information for image semantic understanding in many applications. Most existing computational visual saliency models follow a bottom-up framework that generates independent saliency map in each selected visual feature space and combines them in a proper way. Two big challenges to be addressed explicitly in these methods are (1) which features should be extracted for all pixels of the input image and (2) how to dynamically determine importance of the saliency map generated in each feature space. In order to address these problems, we present a novel saliency map computational model based on tensor decomposition and reconstruction. Tensor representation and analysis not only explicitly represent image's color values but also imply two important relationships inherent to color image. One is reflecting spatial correlations between pixels and the other one is representing interplay between color channels. Therefore, saliency map generator based on the proposed model can adaptively find the most suitable features and their combinational coefficients for each pixel. Experiments on a synthetic image set and a real image set show that our method is superior or comparable to other prevailing saliency map models.


Case1.—In October, 1928, a student, aged 18, of Italian origin, consulted me at Georges polyclinic for seborrhea of the face and scalp. Careful examination disclosed that he was of great scientific interest, owing to the unusual coloration of his skin and gums. During childhood he had had measles and diphtheria. He had smoked a great deal since the age of 15. He suffered from constipation, which sometimes lasted five days. There was nothing of importance in the heredity except that his father's brother had strikingly dark skin. The patient was of middle height and normal constitution, and his general condition was satisfactory. The mental faculties were higher than the average. The internal organs were normal, except that systolic sounds were heard at the apex of the heart. Analysis of the urine gave normal results. There were no signs of syphilis or Addison's disease. The patient firmly refused to


The purpose of this paper is to examine the fiscal characteristics of the new members in the light of the requirements of the SGP and the criticisms levelled against the Pact and to see in what ways their initial conditions differ from those faced by the current euro zone countries in the run-up to the adoption of the euro. Overall, because of the lower debt levels and greater yield convergence already achieved, the new members will be able to rely less on gains from yield convergence than the current euro zone members were able to do. EU accession will also have a negative net impact on the budgets of the new members in the early years of membership. We also look at the cyclical sensitivities of the budgets and find that in the new members the smoothing capacity of the automatic stabilizers might be weaker than in the current euro zone members. Beyond these general characteristics, we also emphasize that there are large differences in the starting fiscal positions of the new members. Some of the policy implications of our findings are discussed.


To explore the benefits of Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), (which is an antimalarial agent that has shown effective pharmacological properties in different malarial conditions and immunological disorders, particularity in chloroquine-sensitive malaria), in the treatment and prevention of Corona Virus Disease-2019 (COVID-19) pandemic because HCQ was recently advocated to minimize the pathogenicity of COVID-19. The aim of this review is to shed the light on a possible mechanism by which HCQ can defeat the COVID-19, a disease characterized by the WHO as a pandemic. Literatures from Web of Science, Scopus, PubMed, Science Direct and Google Scholar were cast-off to search the literature data. The keywords used are antimalarial agent, COVID-19, Hydroxychloroquine, SARS-CoV-2 and Zinc sulfate. The review summarizes the benefits of using HCQ against COVID-19 through exploiting the ability of this antimalarial agent in ameliorating the body immunity, inhibiting and/or delaying the viral glycosylation by increasing the pH inside the host cell and also via suppressing the viral transcription and replication through the formation of a complex structure after binding with zinc. We concluded that these interfering properties of HCQ support human immunity to fight against the progression of COVID-19. We hypothesize that the therapeutic efficiency of HCQ against the COVID-19 can be enhanced by the concurrent administration of zinc sulfate.


One of the key tasks of the current government is to develop the regions and strengthen their economic potential. One of the most important factors of economic growth is investment. For Ukraine, which is in a crisis pit, the issue of attracting foreign investments is especially important and relevant, as they have a significant impact on the economic development of the country. At the same time, the largest degradation in Ukraine today is investment activity, which is also due to the outbreak of COVID-19. Deterioration of the investment climate, the possibilities of budgets at all levels, the decline in business activity of economic entities have led to a difficult state of the investment sphere.
The article analyzes the investment attractiveness of the regions of Ukraine. A special role is focused on the factors (positive and negative) that affect the formation of the investment climate of the regions: positive - geographical location, labor resources; negative - unfavorable climate and corruption.
One of the indicators that reflects the stable economic development of certain sectors of the economy, as well as the country's economy as a whole is the investment potential of the regions. The investment and foreign economic policy of Ivano-Frankivsk UТС is analyzed, which is aimed at improving the image at the regional and international levels, promoting a significant increase in domestic and foreign investment in economic development, the implementation of active information and promotional activities.
In the city, foreign investment is about 580 million dollars. US dollars, of which almost 80 million dollars. USA - loan capital. During the study, we analyzed the largest enterprises in Ivano-Frankivsk, including foreign investment, LLC "Electrolux Ukraine", LLC "Tyco Electronics Ukraine Limited", SE VO "Karpaty" (Delphi project), LLC "Imperial Foods".
The method of expert assessments indicates promising areas of business development of Ivano-Frankivsk UТС. In the course of the research we suggested ways to improve the investment attractiveness of Ivano-Frankivsk UТС.


For many reasons it is essential to know and assess the flow field and its characteristics upand downstream of a turbine stage. For these purpose measurements are conducted in test rigs such as the STTF-AAAI (subsonic test turbine facility for aerodynamic, acoustic, and aeroelastic investigations) at the Institute for Thermal Turbomachinery and Machine Dynamics at Graz University of Technology. A low pressure turbine is operated in engine relevant operating conditions. The turbine is experienced high mechanical loads and is excited to vibrate (forced response). In the rotor design process forced response predictions and structural assessments are performed. However, it is not common to include instrumentation (e.g. total pressure and temperature rakes, five-hole-probes, fast response aerodynamic pressure probes) in these forced response predictions. But, these measurement devices are essential and therefore this paper investigates the influence of such an instrumentation onto the vibrational behaviour of a low pressure turbine rotor of the STTF-AAAI. Several vibration measurements at distinct circumferential and radial positions of the five-hole-probe in the flow channel are conducted. These measurement results are compared to measurements performed without a five-hole-probe in the flow channel. A clear influence of the five-hole-probe on the vibration level is shown.


The construction of alternating multilayers of cationic potato starch and anionic carboxymethylcellulose (CMC) was investigated in two parts. In the first part, stagnation point adsorption reflectometry (SPAR) showed that the chosen chemicals formed polyelectrolyte multilayers (PEM) upon adsorption to the silicon oxide surface. This was in accordance with earlier work. The chosen polyelectrolytes adsorbed to similar extents on the silicon oxide surface and recharged the surface enough to allow for adsorption of a consecutive layer. In the second part, the multilayer concept was tested on 80/20, 20/80% of total in mixture of mixed spruce CTMP and bleached chemical pulp in order to enhance the sheet strength properties of a typical packaging board furnish.. The multilayers yielded a significant improvement in Scott Bond values and tensile index and a marginal improvement in tensile stiffness index. The Scott Bond values were improved more than 150% for papers prepared from a furnish consisting of 80% spruce CTMP and 20% chemical pulp. Polyelectrolyte multilayers treatment also led to a slight densification of the sheets, but the polyelectrolyte multilayers treatment resulted in a more favourable density/strength relationship than that achieved with a change in the amount of chemical pulp.


The general objective of this thesis is the development of an adaptive technique for extracting knowledge in large databases. Nowadays, technology allows storing huge volumes of information. For this reason, the availability of techniques that allow, as a first stage, analyzing that information and obtaining knowledge that can be expressed as classification rules, is of interest. However, the information available is expected to change and/or increase with time, and therefore, as a second stage, it would be relevant to adapt the knowledge acquired to the changes or variations affecting the original data set. The contribution of this thesis is focused on the definition of an adaptive technique that allows extracting knowledge from large databases using a dynamic model that can adapt to information changes, thus obtaining a data mining technique that can generate useful knowledge and produce results that the end user can exploit. The results of this research work can be applied to areas such as soil analysis, genetic analysis, biology, robotics, economy, medicine, plant failure detection, and mobile systems communications. In these cases, obtaining an optimal result is important, since this helps improve the quality of the decisions made after the process.


Zurich — Sunscreens containing ultraviolet B (UVB) filters protect against sunburn, but not against ultraviolet A (UVA) rays, which are deemed responsible for skin cancer. So far, there have been only a limited number of products offering UVA protection in the United States. Possibly the most effective ingredient available for UVA protection is Parsol 1789 (avobenzone), but its photo-instability makes it a less than optimum product in trying to achieve broad spectrum UV protection.


The recent past has seen CNNs take over the field of word spotting. The dominance of these neural networks is fueled by learning to predict a word string embedding for a given input image. While the PHOC (Pyramidal Histogram of Characters) is most prominently used, other embeddings such as the Discrete Cosine Transform of Words have been used as well. In this work, we investigate the use of different word string embeddings for word spotting. For this, we make use of the recently proposed PHOCNet and modify it to be able to not only learn binary representations. Our extensive evaluation shows that a large number of combinations of word string embeddings and loss functions achieve roughly the same results on different word spotting benchmarks. This leads us to the conclusion that no word string embedding is really superior to another and new embeddings should focus on incorporating more information than only character counts and positions.


The history of English language in India begins with the age of colonisation. During this time, India is annexed to the territory of British Empire and Persian language as the official language of the country is replaced by English. This paper is an attempt to overview the development of versified form of Indian writing in English from its early stages up to the present time. In this regard, the six major periods of development of poetry writing by Indian people in English are brought to the fore. The paper depicts the trend of maturity of this unique style of writing, which is frequently referred to as Indo-Anglian Poetry.


Background: Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD) is a progressive irreversible loss of renal function over a period of months or years. When kidney disease progresses, it may eventually lead to kidney failure, which requires dialysis or a kidney transplant to maintains life. Hemodialysis is used for patients who require short term dialysis (days to weeks) and for patients with advanced CKD and End Stage renal Disease (ESRD) who require long term or permanent renal replacement therapy. Hemodialysis significantly and adversely affects the lives of patients, both physically and psychologically. Depression is the most common psychological condition among patients with ESRD. Depression in dialysis patients not only effect mortality, but increased rate of hospitalizations and dialysis withdrawal is also very common. Methods: A descriptive cross sectional research design was carried out to identify the depression level of chronic kidney disease patients receiving Hemodialysis in Western Regional Hospital, Pokhara using Beck Depression Inventory among forty six patients. Results: The study findings revealed that majority of the patients (84.8%) has various degree of depression i.e. mild (21.7%), moderate (30.8%) and severe (32.6%). Only fifteen percent of patient has no depression. There was no statistical association between the level of depression and socio-demographic variables. It can be concluded that the prevalence of depression is high among patients receiving Hemodialysis. Conclusion: The prevalence of depression is high among patients receiving Hemodialysis. It is effective to provide mental health services to the CKD patients receiving Hemodialysis which help them better psychologically adaptation to their disease and improve their quality of life.


All-to-all personalized communication commonly occurs in many important parallel algorithms, such as FFT and matrix transpose. This paper presents new algorithms for all-to-all personalized communication or complete exchange in multidimensional torus- or mesh-connected multiprocessors. For an R/spl times/C torus or mesh where R/spl les/C, the proposed algorithms have time complexities of O(C) message startups and O(RC/sup 2/) message transmissions. The algorithms for three- or higher-dimensional tori or meshes follow a similar structure. Unlike other existing message-combining algorithms in which the number of nodes in each dimension should be a power-of-two and square, the proposed algorithms accommodate non-power-of-two tori or meshes where the number of nodes in each dimension need not be power-of-two and square. In addition, destinations remain fixed over a larger number of steps in the proposed algorithms, thus making them amenable to optimizations. Finally, the data structures used are simple, hence making substantial savings of message-rearrangement time.


In order to react to the continuous and unpredictable changes in product demand, in product variety, and in process technologies, reconfigurable manufacturing systems allow quick adjustment of production capacity and functionality by rearranging or changing their modular components. In this kind of system, operation management issues, such as exception handling policies, become more complex since correct reconfiguration strategies have to be selected. This paper explores the potential of the reconfigurability feature to be a basis for the development of new strategies to handle out-of-the-ordinary events in the production process; in particular, maintaining production flow when machine breakdowns occur. Decisions regarding how to deal with exceptions to the production process are complex and depend on the manufacturing system configuration and on many performance and economic variables. The authors propose agent-based manufacturing control for exception handling because of its ability to be very agile, as well as being reactive and efficient. Manufacturing agents, while working to pursue their specific goals, achieve the global target of the system. Complex decisions can be made due to the synergy arising from the agents' internal reasoning and the negotiation process among these agents. The adopted negotiation mechanism is based on the contract-net protocol, while different strategies have been designed for the internal reasoning. The authors demonstrate that, under certain conditions, an agent's internal strategies based on fuzzy reasoning improve the global performance of the system. The proposed control model has been tested on a discrete event simulation test-bed.


Formation of brood stock is considered to be one of the most important operations in order to acquire eggs and fry from any promising candidate finfish species for aquaculture production. The sex reversal observed in hermaphrodite species adds to confusion and creates additional complications in forming a brood stock. The present study describes the efforts and the results of the brood stock formation of the hermaphrodite finfish species Pagellus erythrinus (common Pandora) from individuals aged between 4 and 5 years (TL>300mm) reared in floating cages. Six groups were formed (50 fish/group) in all of which females were present comprising 20 to 40% of the population. The presence of females was in contrast to the literature, which reported that sex reversal of the common Pandora is complete in naturally occurring populations with the absence of females in sizes of a total length greater than 220mm, indicating that in captivity sex reversal is not complete for this species. Four of the groups formed spawned under natural environmental conditions without hormonal treatment and the other two groups were administered a different dosage (250 and 500 IU/kg) of Human Chorionic Gonadotropin (HCG) to induce spawning. The reproductive period started in the middle of May and ended at the beginning of July and spontaneous spawning occurred in all groups. Egg release lasted for a mean period of one month for the groups that spawned without hormonal treatment with no significant difference in the number of viable eggs between groups. The groups that spawned under hormonal treatment released eggs for a period of six and seven days, for the group that spawned under the high and low hormonal treatment, respectively, with no significant difference in the number of viable eggs between them. The hormonal induced spawning resulted in egg release within a short period of time ideal for a hatchery. However, the number of viable eggs produced was significantly lower compared to the number of viable eggs produced from groups that spawned without hormonal treatment.


SCOPE
This study evaluates the effects of a chronic high protein diet (HPD) on kidney injury, intestinal permeability and gut microbiota perturbations in a mouse model.

METHOD AND RESULTS
Mice are fed a diet containing either 20% or 52% energy from protein for 24 weeks; protein displaced an equivalent amount of wheat starch. The HPD does not alter glycemic control or body weight. The HPD induces kidney injury as evidenced by increase in albuminuria, urinary kidney injury molecule-1, blood urea nitrogen, urinary isoprostanes and renal cortical NF-κB p65 gene expression. HPD decreases intestinal occludin gene expression, increases plasma endotoxin and plasma monocyte chemoattractant protein-1, indicating intestinal leakiness and systemic inflammation. Cecal microbial analysis reveals that HPD feeding does not alter alpha diversity; however, it does alter beta diversity, indicating an altered microbial community structure with HPD feeding. Predicted metagenome pathway analysis demonstrates a reduction in branched-chain amino acid synthesis and an increase of the urea cycle with consumption of a HPD.

CONCLUSION
These results demonstrate that long term HPD consumption in mice causes albuminuria, systemic inflammation, increase in gastrointestinal permeability and is associated with gut microbiome remodeling with an increase in the urea cycle pathway, which may contribute to renal injury.


Cytokines are crucial molecules for maintaining the proper functioning of the immune system. Nevertheless, a dysregulation of cytokine expression could be involved in the pathogenesis of autoimmune diseases. Interleukin (IL)-15 is a key factor for natural killer cells (NK) and CD8 T cells homeostasis, necessary to fight cancer and infections but could also be considered as a pro-inflammatory cytokine involved in autoimmune inflammatory disease, including rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis, along with tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-α), IL-6, and IL-1β. The molecular mechanisms by which IL-15 exerts its inflammatory function in these diseases are still unclear. In this study, we generated an IL-15-derived molecule called NANTIL-15 (New ANTagonist of IL-15), designed to selectively inhibit the action of IL-15 through the high-affinity trimeric IL-15Rα/IL-2Rβ/γc receptor while leaving IL-15 signaling through the dimeric IL-2Rβ/γc receptor unaffected. Administrating of NANTIL-15 in healthy mice did not affect the IL-15-dependent cell populations such as NK and CD8 T cells. In contrast, we found that NANTIL-15 efficiently reduced signs of inflammation in a collagen-induced arthritis model. These observations demonstrate that the inflammatory properties of IL-15 are linked to its action through the trimeric IL-15Rα/IL-2Rβ/γc receptor, highlighting the interest of selectively targeting this receptor.


The aim of this paper is to identify the unknown properties of an industrial hot air gun using inverse heat transfer approach. A combination of experiments and numerical analyses is used to define the convection coefficient and the produced temperature of this device. A numerical solver is developed by employment of a straightforward and powerful inverse heat transfer method: "The conjugate gradient method for parameter estimation". The variation of temperature versus time in a fixed point of a steel-304 rod is sensed by a thermocouple and is given as an input to the numerical solver. The produced temperature of the hot air gun and the variation of convection heat transfer coefficient of this device as a function of distance between gun and rod are estimated in this research. Two nondimensional distances between hot air gun and head of rod, H/D, are considered in this research: 2 and 6. These distances are chosen based on the hot jet potential core, the former is inside the potential core and the latter is outside it. The identifications of this gun are used in the process of determining unknown thermal properties of insulating and ablative materials, which are essential components of ablative heat shields, by inverse heat transfer methods.


Text-to-speech (TTS) models have achieved remarkable naturalness in recent years, yet like most deep neural models, they have more parameters than necessary. Sparse TTS models can improve on dense models via pruning and extra retraining, or converge faster than dense models with some performance loss. Inspired by these results, we propose training TTS models using a decaying sparsity rate, i.e. a high initial sparsity to accelerate training first, followed by a progressive rate reduction to obtain better eventual performance. This decremental approach differs from current methods of incrementing sparsity to a desired target, which costs significantly more time than dense training. We call our method SNIPER training: Single-shot Initialization Pruning Evolving-Rate training. Our experiments on FastSpeech2 show that although we were only able to obtain better losses in the first few epochs before being overtaken by the baseline, the final SNIPER-trained models beat constant-sparsity models and pip dense models in performance.


New vehicle purchases by private companies and government agencies, or 'fleet' buyers, represent a significant percentage of overall new vehicle sales in the United States. Yet little is known about fleet demand for new vehicle fuel economy including how it responds to fuel price changes. Using unique disaggregated data on fleet and household registrations of new vehicles from 2009 to 2016, we estimate how fleet demand for new vehicle fuel economy responds to fuel price changes. We find that fleet purchases of low fuel economy vehicles fall relative to high fuel economy vehicles when gasoline prices increase, a finding that is consistent with fleet buyers' taking into account capitalization of fuel costs in the second‐hand market. Our estimates imply that raising gasoline prices by one dollar would increase fuel economy of new vehicles acquired by fleet buyers by 0.33 miles per gallon. We estimate a similar response for household buyers during the same period. This result justifies basing fuel economy responses to fuel cost changes on household data alone, an assumption widely used in the vehicle demand literature and the fuel economy valuation literature. We also find, however, that the response to fuel price changes varies across the types of fleet buyers: rental companies respond strongly to fuel price changes, whereas commercial and government buyers are insensitive. Our estimates imply that an increase in the federal gasoline tax would modestly increase fuel economy of vehicles bought by households and rental companies but would have little to no impact on fuel economy of vehicles bought by non‐rental companies and governments.


: Background: Recent advances in unscrambling the epigenetic and genetic keystones of tauopathies have occurred but less development is seen in treatments and effects after treatments. It is a challenge to prognosticate enormously complex area of tauopathy and neurodegeneration by finding out the mystery behind the differential expression of genes and its network during the process of neurodegeneration. Objective: The functional development of neurons is based on regulation of genetic blueprint of brain and is a matter of extensive research to understand the role and differential expression of genes and regulators to identify the novel targets and biomarkers responsible for identification of neurodegenerative disorders occurring due to DNA Damage, aging and tauopathy. Hence highthroughput genome data is exploited to predict the expression and function of genes involved during the process of neurodegeneration in TAU mutated flies brain. Methodology: Here we worked on chain of software to find out the hidden genomic mystery of TAU mutated flies against the control flies by analyzing their next generation sequencing data and identifying important landmarks in genes which express differentially in TAU mutant flies. The study shows differential expression of many genes involved in epigenetic regulation which can be used as prognostic biomarker in neurodegenrative disorders and tauopathies including Alzheimer disease (AD). Results: Our study implicates the role of heterochromatic condensation leads to apoptotic action in tauopathologies. The genes which are involved in notch signaling, autophagy and protein serine/threonine kinase pathway are found to be differentially expressed which gives a clue of their causal role in disrupting cell cycle, DNA damage, heterochromatin condensation, and apoptosis indicating the dreadful future of neurotoxicity in an individual. Conclusion: We focused specifically on pathways, and the genes which are involved in regulation of these pathways, and also found thata large class of highly conserved, small, noncoding RNAs that are responsible for RNA interference and found out their different expression in TAU mediated flies.


In debating Massachusetts business tax policy, protagonists have cited many different indicators purporting to assess the fairness, adequacy, and competitiveness of the Commonwealth's business taxes. These statistics actually reveal very little about the degree to which Massachusetts business taxes achieve these widely accepted tax policy goals. The author explains why these indicators are misleading and presents new indicators of business tax competitiveness that, although imperfect, are more accurate than those most widely quoted. The article concludes that the fairness of Massachusetts business taxes is unclear and that the Commonwealth's corporate income taxes are inadequate. The clearest conclusion drawn is that Massachusetts business taxes do not harm its competitive standing.


The 15 years since dialogue was established between China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) have witnessed steadily improving relations between the two sides. ASEAN, founded in 1967, includes Thailand, Laos, Myanmar, Viet Nam, Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines and Brunei. Despite being close neighbours, China and ASEAN did not have official relations until 1991, due largely to the negative influence of the Cold War. China and ASEAN's member countries are all developing nations, and therefore share many common interests. As the Cold War came to an end, the two sides put economic development and maintenance of regional stability on top of their agenda. In this scenario, the two sides had the intention for dialogue and co-operation.


This PhD study is a contribution to the contemporary debate on the educational uses of digital technology with young children in early childhood education and care (ECEC) institutions. For young children growing up in the 21st century, digital technology is intertwined in their everyday lives. Nevertheless, children's use of digital technology in ECEC is still limited, especially with regards to creative use of technology. Several researchers call for more empirical studies of young children's creation with digital technology. In this study, digital technology is emphasised as a tool to create, by which the children and the teachers are the creators of their own products to be shared with others. The purpose is to contribute with research-based knowledge of children's and teachers' collaborative, technology- mediated story creation processes. The overall research question is as follows: What emerges when kindergarten teachers involve groups of children (age 4-5 years) in technology-mediated story creation processes? The study has a qualitative multiple-case study approach with two cases, focusing on observable contemporary events. In both cases, six children and one kindergarten teacher have created a multimodal digital story together: an e-book and an animated movie. The empirical material consists of video-recorded field-observations of the process, interviews with the participants and the final products. The research question is operationalised into three sub-questions that address the overall question from three perspectives: the participants, the creation processes, and the final products. In Article I, the technology- mediated creation process is explored, which can be described as a complex interplay of traditional non-digital activities and new digital activities. For the children, to record sound and to share were found to be the most important. In Article II, the teachers' pedagogical strategies during the creation process with the children is emphasised. The three most frequently used pedagogical strategies were inviting to dialogue, explaining the practical, and instructing for results. In Article III, the animated movie is explored in-depth through a focus on how different modalities and literacy devices contribute to the development of the story. The importance of including the process, the product, the literacy devices, and all of the modalities in the analysis is highlighted, as well as the importance of being open for the magic during young children's creation processes. Through the analysis of the three articles, four new themes have arisen: emerging possibilities due to digital technology; creators in a creative process; an interplay of multiple knowledge areas; and the process is not enough. In the discussion I argue that a technology-mediated story creation process with a group of kindergarten children and a teacher can be interpreted as a collaborative creative process. A synergy of ideas arises through the collaborative co-construction process. Each single part of the creative process may not be viewed as being inherently creative; however, the fusion of these parts into a final multimodal digital story makes it an example of the creative use of digital technology. The children and teachers collaborate and create a product that is new, original and meaningful for them. The process is vital; however, the process itself is not enough—the product also matters—especially for the children. Teachers' capacity and knowledge of how to integrate technology and pedagogy with other relevant knowledge areas such as creativity and creative processes are crucial when using digital technology with children in ECEC. The final products may seem complicated to create; however, it is easier than it seems. The study contributes with research- based knowledge of creative use of digital technology with groups of young children, important for the ECEC field and kindergarten teacher education.


Taxing sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) has been proposed as a means to improve U.S. diet and health and generate revenue to address obesity-related issues. A related concern is that children's intake of SSBs, a third that of milk consumption in the late 1970s, now equals milk consumption. Displacing milk by SSBs may shortchange the buildup of bone mass, increasing the risk of fractures and osteoporosis in later life. Accordingly, we examine the effects that a 20- percent SSB tax and a 20-percent milk price subsidy would have on the diet and health of American children. We estimated US beverage demand systems and used the estimated demand elasticities to examine the impacts of the hypothetical SSB tax and milk subsidy. Our results suggest that a 20-percent tax-induced increase in soda price alone would reduce calorie intakes by 40 calories a day among children, lowering the obesity rate from 16.1 percent to 13.4 percent and the overweight rate from 32 percent to 26.9 percent. When a 20-percent price subsidy for milk is bundled with the SSB tax, children would on average decrease their calorie intake (21 calories a day) and increase their calcium intake, but the overweight and obesity rates would actually increase by around 2 percent. The seemingly contradiction between the two averages, lower calories and higher obesity, is due to the fact that the majority of children (90 percent) remain unchanged in their weight classification under the price interventions but on average reduce their calorie intake. Six percent of children increase their calorie intake and gain enough weight to cross the overweight threshold, whereas four percent of children decrease their calorie intake to improve from being overweight to healthy weight. Therefore, when averaging the effects of the price interventions, we found a decrease in calorie intake and higher overweight and obesity rates.


SINCE 1956, controlled surgical intestinal bypass has been performed for obesity in a number of patients with careful preoperative evaluation and a detailed follow-up examination over a period of several years.1-3Prior to this, there were only the sporadic cases reported within the literature where massive small intestinal resection in man was performed because of either vascular occlusion or extensive tumor which involved the small intestine and its blood supply. There are well-documented human cases which reveal that the loss of 80% to 90% of the small intestine has been compatible with survival for several years.4-6 The effects of resectional surgery and the associated nutritional abnormalities are well known. However, the recent bypass operations have been followed for only a few years, and the literature of the complications has been meager. The consequences of these operations appear to be of an unpredictable nature; this is possibly due to


Brief episodes of network faults and performance issues adversely affect the user Quality of Experience (QoE). Besides damaging the current opinions of users, these events may also shape user's future perception of the service. Therefore, it is important to quantify the impact of such events on QoE over time. In this paper, we present our findings on the temporal aspects of user feedback to disturbances on networks. These findings are based on subjective user tests performed in the context of web browsing on an e-commerce website. The results of this study suggest that the QoE drops significantly every time the page load time grows. The after-effects of network disturbances on user QoE remain visible even when the network problems are over, i.e., users do not immediately return to the same level of opinion scores as compared to the corresponding pre-disturbance phase. They tend to remember their recent experiences. Our results also show that there are four segments of users that exist with regards to their feedback to page load times. Network operators may customize their services according to each segment of users to raise the overall QoE. Finally, we show that the exponential relationship provides best fits of QoE and page load times for all segments of users.


Dr PHELIM DONNELLY (Department of Medicine, Rheumatology and Rehabilitation, Saint Brigid's Hospital, Merlin Park, Co Galway) writes: Mr Derek G Machin and Mr John M Shennan (27 August, p 586) draw deserved attention to the 12th rib syndrome as a cause of back and abdominal pain. As well as occurring spontaneously as an isolated phenomenon the condition can contribute to the axial pain complex of spondylitis. As their case reports show two types of pain may be associated with this syndrome: the pain from the inflamed or deranged rib, sharp and radiating, and a background or residual dull pain, which probably results from pressure on the overlying kidney, which rests on the right side on the 12th rib, on the left usually on the 11th and 12th. Not only will manipulation of the affected rib reproduce the symptoms, as the authors state, but digital pressure on the rib will often produce the dull pain of the syndrome. Before surgical resection of the rib, infiltration of the area with long acting local anaesthetic such as bupivacaine, by relieving the sharp component of the pain, confirms the diagnosis.


In each of the media systems identified by Hallin and Mancini (2004), autonomy, professional norms and a public service ethic are central indicators of journalism professionalisation, with codes of ethics and accountability solutions, such as press councils, germane. In the Liberal North Atlantic system, where Ireland is placed by Hallin and Mancini, autonomy and professional norms are well established pillars in academia's understanding of journalism. Indeed, the theoretical work on press and media systems (Siebert, Peterson and Schramm 1956; Merrill 1974; Altschull 1984; Habermas 1989; McQuail 2010) recognises these characteristics. The idea of a public service orientation via a system of media accountability opens up a potentially valuable avenue for examining the journalistic professionalisation process. In Liberal North Atlantic countries, non-institutionalised or informal self-regulation of the press is common, Hallin and Mancini argued. The literature, however, suggests this regulation (press councils) has failed to provide the public with robust media accountability outcomes. Research in Canada (Pritchard 2000), the United States (Ugland 2000 & 2008), and in Britain (O'Malley and Soley 2000; Frost 2000 2004, 2015) support the conclusion that industry power over self-regulatory instruments has infected structures, procedures and decision-making. Thus, this study examines a new regulatory model which has received little attention to date – the independent and legislatively recognised Press Council of Ireland. Here, the formal process of institutionalisation has seen the codification of an accepted set of professional norms via a code of ethics thereby apparently strengthening the autonomy of journalists by clearly defining the journalistic role for industry and the public while also strengthening the concept of journalistic accountability. This thesis investigates whether the institutionalisation of independent press regulation in the Irish case has established a robust accountability framework for the press.


Using an Argo dataset and the ECCOv4 reanalysis, a volume budget was performed to address the main mechanisms driving the volume change of the interior water masses in the Southern Hemisphere oceans between 2006 and 2015. The subduction rates and the isopycnal and diapycnal water-mass transformation were estimated in a density–spiciness (σ–τ) framework. Spiciness, defined as thermohaline variations along isopycnals, was added to the potential density coordinates to discriminate between water masses spreading on isopycnal layers. The main positive volume trends were found to be associated with the Subantarctic Mode Waters (SAMW) in the South Pacific and South Indian Ocean basins, revealing a lightening of the upper waters in the Southern Hemisphere. The SAMW exhibits a two-layer density structure in which subduction and diapycnal transformation from the lower to the upper layers accounted for most of the upper-layer volume gain and lower-layer volume loss, respectively. The Antarctic Intermediate Waters, defined here between the 27.2 and 27.5 kg m−3 isopycnals, showed the strongest negative volume trends. This volume loss can be explained by their negative isopyncal transformation southward of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current into the fresher and colder Antarctic Winter Waters (AAWW) and northward into spicier tropical/subtropical Intermediate Waters. The AAWW is destroyed by obduction back into the mixed layer so that its net volume change remains nearly zero. The proposed mechanisms to explain the transformation within the Intermediate Waters are discussed in the context of Southern Ocean dynamics. The σ–τ decomposition provided new insight on the spatial and temporal water-mass variability and driving mechanisms over the last decade.


Submerged leaf litter is a vital resource for many aquatic species in wood- land streams. However, forestry tends to lower the diversity of litter entering streams, which potentially impacts leaf-dependent species and the entire detritus-based food web. To overcome this problem, a guideline for sustainable forestry and ecosystem conservation lies in increasing litter diversity in managed forests. However, the way in and the extent to which such an increase changes the leaf decomposer communities are mostly unknown. In the present study, fungal communities were surveyed bimonthly in ten woodland headwater streams with contrasting tree diversity resulting in various proportions of leaf species in litter. A total of 79 aquatic hyphomycete species identi- fied from conidia in stream water were listed. The differences in conidial abundance, richness and diversity between communities from the ten streams suggested a strong effect of local abundance and composition of leaf litter. Conidial abundance clearly distinguished two sets of streams, one dominated by oaks and hazel and the other by beech. The fungal richness in the ten streams showed a positive and significant corre- lation with the leaf species richness, accounting for 44 % of the total variance among streams. About 50 % more fungal species were found in streams with the highest leaf litter diversity, and several species were more frequent in such streams. No distinct species assemblages were however associated with any particular leaf species. These findings were interpreted as resulting from substrate preferences, but not specificity by the fungal species. This is supported by a manipulation in which the addition of a bulk of hazel leaves in a stream dominated by beech did not result in an increase in fungal richness over three months. Seasonal changes appeared to be the main factor controll- ing fungal species abundance. Overall, the results suggest a hierarchical pattern be- tween riparian and aquatic biodiversity and provide an argument for the conservation of diverse tree species along streams.


OZAY MEHMET is Professor of International Affairs at Carleton University and author of Westernizing the Third World (1995). Our capitalist world has been shaped by a 200 year-old Western economic tradition that dates back to the publication of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations in 1776. This date also coincides with the onset of the British Industrial Revolution, when the construction of capitalism began in earnest. Capitalism is an efficiency-oriented system of resource allocation. It has served the West exceedingly well, but it is unfit for the "Global Village," which requires not only rules of efficiency but also rules of equity and sustainability to ensure the welfare of all the world's citizens. Capitalism is driven by the profit motive. An increase in profits requires continuous accumulation of capital. Hence, the central logic of capitalism is accumulation through "capitalization," a gradual transformation of non-capital resources (for example, labor and environment) into forms of capital. This transformation process occurs according to market forces of supply and demand on the basis of revealed preferences that are assumed to be rational. Though often rational, these preferences are sometimes derived from the worst aspects of selfish behavior, such as greed and mindless consumerism. The result of capitalization is private ownership and control. It is no accident that the West holds the largest stock of capital assets in the world. This outcome is the by-product of market forces. Economics textbooks extol the concept of perfect competition based on perfect foresight, full information, and a level playing field. In reality, perfect competition is an academic abstraction. The real market system, dominated by monopolies and cartels, works to enrich the West by impoverishing the rest of mankind. The flip side of this impoverishment is income and wealth concentration in the West, almost always benefiting the rich. Global market forces are Western-based because economics, as a body of scientific knowledge, is pro-capital and anti-labor. While capital and technology are priced in the West at high levels, Third World resources are underpriced. This polarization is accomplished either by treating the environment as a free good and labor as plentiful and cheap, or by such indirect means as intra-corporate transfer pricing. Unions and social safety nets ensure workers in the West decent wages, but few Third World workers enjoy such protection. Underpricing Third World labor, environment, and resources overstates the rate of return on capital, overvalues capital assets, encourages speculation, and leads finally to the collapse of financial markets--as happened in the case of the Asian currency meltdown in 1997-98. In the nineteenth century, the search for profit converted England from a closed, agrarian economy to the "workshop of the world," dominated by aggressive captains of industry. Despite the initial success of industrialization, classical economists were pessimistic about the long-term sustainability of capitalism. John Stuart Mill predicted the ultimate collapse of the system due to vanishing profits in a stationary state. Thomas Malthus forecast a population explosion owing to an ever-worsening population-food imbalance. The internationalization of free trade and colonial expansion have postponed the collapse predicted by nineteenth-century economists, but it has not eliminated the inherent danger. England, a small island, could ship its excess population to the colonies, but mankind has nowhere to go to escape the law of diminishing returns on a global scale. The world could not sustain itself if everyone in India and China, for example, were to emulate the Western consumer's ideal of becoming a two-car owning family and living in a 3000 square-foot home. To date, globalization, or a universalized market economy, has meant trade liberalization, free capital mobility in financial flows, and the diffusion of technology. …


After excision of the hemipelvis through a combined subnatal and anterior incision preserving the lower extremity, five patients with periacetabular chondrosarcoma, after a follow-up of three to six years, were able to walk with no support or with minimum lateral support and had resumed their preoperative occupations. None had either the instability that might have been anticipated or incapacitating discomfort from the neoarthrosis, and there was no evidence of spread or recurrence of tumor in any of the five patients. The procedure, which has the same basic indications as a hindquarter amputation, is a rewarding substitute for that mutilating operation, although the follow-up is too short and the series is too small to warrant conclusions as to the cure rate.


We study the properties of the heat flow generated by electric current in a quantum dot (QD) molecular sandwiched between two ferromagnetic leads. The heat is exchanged between the QD and the phonon reservoir coupled to it. We find that when the leads' magnetic moments are in parallel configuration, the total heat generation is independent on the leads' spin-polarization regardless of the magnitude of the intradot Coulomb interaction. This behavior is similar to that of the electronic current. In the antiparallel configuration, however, the influences of the leads' ferromagnetism on the heat generation are quite different from those on the electric current. Under the conditions of weak intradot Coulomb interaction and small bias voltage, the heat generation is monotonously suppressed by increasing leads' spin-polarization. Whereas for sufficient large intradot Coulomb interaction and bias voltage, the heat generation shows non-monotonous behavior due to the electron-phonon interaction and the spin accumulation induced on the dot. Furthermore, the magnitude of the negative differential of the heat generation previously found in a QD connected to nonmagnetic leads can be weakened by the increase of the spin-polarization of the ferromagnetic leads.


Abstract – The development of technology makes Internet to be the most promising tool. It is simply because the process of advertising becomes easy, free, efficient, and accessible to all people directly even simultaneously because it is online. Internet capable of reaching out to all corners of the world and available 24 hours a day. In an effort to strengthen the brand identity on the internet, it takes wording or phrase to summarize or express purpose and spirit of the brand, which is a tagline. The presence of the tagline is not an absolute, but has a unique role in developing the brand image in advertisement posted on a website. This condition encourages researchers to be interested in reviewing the text form of berniaga.com tagline which reads "Happy selling Easy purchasing". The approach used in this study is qualitative analysis method semiology of Ferdinand de Saussure. The results showed that the communicant aimed to capture the meaning of the sign in the form of consumer culture. The tagline of berniaga.com sites that are practically encouraging reader to interpret that online shopping can be done easily and quickly take place. Keywords – Brand Identity, Tagline, berniaga.com, Saussure's Semiology


This brief essay outlines the case for a postcolonial presentism arising at the intersection of two urgent areas of inquiry: the literary and linguistic study of global Anglophonism, on the one hand, and the humanistic and social-scientific study of the Anthropocene, on the other. It explores a series of entangled definitions of the Anglophone and the Anthropocene, including how each serves as an assessment of the uneven present, as a universalizing discourse, and as a force of temporalization. The essay contests the proposition that the key conceptual problem posed by the present is its "unthinkability" and argues instead for a reconsideration, through a strategically presentist postcolonial literary studies, of the present's relationship to past and future.


Analysis of transcriptome revealed that a membrane occupation and recognition nexus (MORN) repeat protein-encoding gene of Euplotes octocarinatus (Eo-morn-9-31) was a candidate for programmed +1 ribosomal frameshifting (+1 PRF). In this study, a dual-luciferase assay was performed to detect its expression. The result showed that the MORN repeat protein (Eo-MORN-9-31) could be produced by the +1 PRF event during the process of translation in yeast and the frameshifting efficiency was about 4–5%. We further confirmed its reality by western blot and mass spectrometry. This study provided experimental evidence indicating that the expression of the Eo-MORN-9-31 of E. octocarinatus required the +1 PRF. Graphical abstract The Eo-morn-9-31 could produce a MORN repeat protein containing nine MORN repeats with an apparent molecular weight of 41.2 kD, or only encode a truncated protein (34.8 kD) depending +1 PRF.


Rolling bearings play an important role in the aerospace industry, manufacturing, and nuclear engineering. To ensure the reliable and stable operation of various mechanical equipment, the research on bearing fault diagnosis is very practical and critical. With the rapid development of smart manufacturing and industrial big data, deep learning has become an effective solution for emerging fault identification. Due to the different distributions of training samples and test samples for bearing faults, researchers have introduced many transfer learning methods to solve this problem. The traditional methods assume that the features of the target domain are known, or that the target domain has sufficient samples (similar to the number of training samples). However, these conditions are often difficult to meet in reality. In this paper, we proposed a Stable Feature Reweighting Transformer (SFRT) to deeply mine correlated features in fault signals and remove dependencies between correlated and irrelevant features. This helps the model mine the correspondence between distinguishing features and fault labels. Therefore, our method can complete the fault diagnosis task under variable working conditions with high quality when the target domain is unknown. Extensive experiments on CWRU and PU datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on multiple distributional generalization tasks. Compared to state-of-the-art methods, our model produces the best fault identification accuracy.


A theoretical investigation of the ground state electronic structure of InAs/GaAs quantum confined structures is presented. Energy levels of cuboids and pyramidal shaped dots are calculated using a single-band, constant-confining-potential model that in former applications has proved to reproduce well both the predictions of very sophisticated treatments and several features of many experimental photoluminescence spectra. A connection rule between their ground state energies is found which allows the calculation of the energy levels of pyramidal dots using those of cuboids of suitably chosen dimensions, whose solution requires considerably less computational effort. The purpose of this work is to provide experimentalists with a versatile and simple method to analyze their spectra. As an example, this rule is then applied to successfully reproduce the position of the ground state transition peaks of some experimental photoluminescence spectra of self-assembled pyramidal dots. Furthermore the rule is used t...


Functional dyspepsia represents one of the most common and prevalent disorders of the brain–gut interaction, with a large number of widespread risk factors being identified. With an intricate pathogenesis and symptomatology, it heavily impacts the quality of life and, due to the limited efficacy of traditional pharmacological agents, patients are likely to seek other medical and non-medical solutions to their problem. Over the last few years, significant research in this domain has emphasized the importance of various psychological therapies and nutritional recommendations. Nevertheless, a correlation has been established between functional dyspepsia and food intolerances, with more and more patients adopting different kinds of exclusion diets, leading to weight loss, restrictive eating behaviour and an imbalanced nutritional state, further negatively impacting their quality of life. Thus, in this systematic review, we aimed at analysing the impact and efficiency of certain exclusion diets undertook by patients, more precisely, the gluten-free diet and the low-FODMAP diet.


Introduction: Patients of chronic liver disease can develop anemia due to a number of reasons which include coagulopathy, increased amount of hepcidin which limits iron transfer from marcophages to bone marrow, loss of blood through varices. Patients can have both IDA and ACD or anyone of them. The cause of patients anemia can be evaluated by thorough testing and iron studies. Serum ferritin and total iron binding capacity differentiate between IDA and ACD. Material and Methods: Our study was descriptive cross sectional study conducted at services hospital Lahore in its gastroenterology department. All the patients having chronic liver disease presenting either through Outdoor or Emergency were included in our study and proper consent was taken before including them in the study. Their laboratory investigations were accessed for data collection and questionnaires were filled accordingly. Results and Discussion: A total of 67 patients were included in our study. The overall prevlance of anemia in patients of CLD came out to be 47%. The results showed that 40.62% of patients had iron deficieny anemia where as 37.5% patients had Anemia of chronic disease whereas rest were having uncategorized anemia. Most of the anemic patients of Chronic liver disease were having Child Pugh Class-C which were 21 in number (65.62% of all the anemic patients). Our study well established the asscoaition of iron deficieny anemia and Aneia of chronic disease with the CLD. Thus all the patients of CLD must be screened for anemia periodically.


This article analyzes deviations in an automation project. The article develops a more holistic view of the project organization, focusing on how deviations are managed. The case study demonstrates that the tools and methods suggested in the literature are rarelyused, and shows the importance of the context of the project in terms of gathering information and sharing knowledge that is required to manage deviations. Furthermore, the case shows that there are a number of deviation-management tactics that are applied to different deviations, dependent on whether they are uncertain and/or ambiguous.


Background and objectives: Acute pancreatitis is a disorder that has a wide-ranging presentation, etiology, multifactorial pathogenesisandclinicalconsequencesfrommildselflimitingtoseverelife threatening. The aim of this study is to evaluate demographic characteristics, etiology, clinical presentation and its management.
Materials and methods: This retrospective study was carried out in Department of Surgery of National Medical College and Teaching Hospital. A total of45 patients with diagnosis as acute pancreatitis over period of March 2020 to February 2022 were included in this study. History and detailed clinical examination was performed as per the working proforma which included. Chi square test were used for correlation analysis. Data analysis was done using SPSS (Statistical Package for social sciences), version 25.
Results: Most of acute pancreatitis were seen in 20-39 years of age group with mean age of 39.7 years. 66.6% patients were female. Gall stone was the most common cause (71.1% patients) of pancreatitis. Abdominal pain was the most common mode of presentation, and tenderness the most common sign. Most of the patients were managed conservatively. Median hospital stay was 9 days.
Conclusion: Acute pancreatitis is a common cause of acute abdomen in patients presenting to the emergency department. Gall stone is the most common cause of acute pancreatitis .Clinical diagnosis along with biochemical and radiological findings are required for diagnosis .The management is mainly conservative.


Microbial corrosion is considered the main reason for multi-billion dollar sewer asset degradation. Sewer pipe surface temperature is a vital parameter for predicting the micro-biologically induced concrete corrosion. Due to this important measure, a surface temperature sensor suite was recently developed and tested in an aggressive sewer environment. The sensors can fail and they may also put offline during the period of scheduled maintenance. In such situations, time series forecasting of sensor data can be an alternative measure for the operators managing the sewer network. In this regard, this paper focuses on the short-term forecasting of sensor measurements. The evaluation was carried out by forecasting the sensor measurements for different time periods and evaluated with different forecasting models. The ETS model leads to high short-term forecasting accuracy and the ARIMA model leads to high long-term forecasting accuracy. The models were evaluated on real data captured in a Sydney sewer.


The paper deals with the determination of the characteristic strength and the Weibull modulus m of Si3N4 and SiC ceramic materials using conventional four-point bending and unconventional contact tests between opposite rollers and opposite spheres. Ceramographic and fractographic methods were used for the characterization of strength degrading defects represented by processing flaws and by cracks of different types arising during the loading. The processing flaws influenced the Weibull parameters mainly in the bending mode, and the strength and its scatter in contact modes was influenced by lateral, median and contact end cracks, originated during the contact test using rollers, and by cone cracks originated during the contact test using spheres.


BACKGROUND: Strength-power tests are commonly used to monitor performance improvement and to assess preparedness for competition in weightlifters. Previous studies were limited to male weightlifters, consisted of a small number of tests, or used small samples of female weightlifters. OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this study is to determine the strongest indicators of weightlifting performance (WPER) and to reveal the relationships between competition performance and strength-power tests in junior female weightlifters. METHODS: Forty-two female weightlifters (age: 17.8 ± 2.3 years, body mass: 56.6 ± 8.1 kg; height: 156.1 ± 5.8) participated in this study. Participants were tested on a series of performance indicators including Wingate anaerobic power (lower and upper body), isokinetic leg force, vertical jumps, handgrip strength, and isometric leg strength following a national weightlifting competition. Competition performance was calculated with the Sinclair equation. Pearson correlation analysis was used to reveal the relationships between strength-power variables and Sinclair score, and Ridge regression analysis was used to determine the strongest indicators of WPER. RESULTS: The main results showed that Wingate leg peak power (L-PP) and countermovement jump height (CMJ) were the strongest indicators for WPER. They accounted for 74% of the common variance. Additionally, there was a significant correlation between strength-power variables (r= 0.41–0.846) and Sinclair score. CONCLUSIONS: This study's findings suggest that the strongest predictors of WPER are L-PP and CMJ, and these tests can be used to monitor WPER in junior female weightlifters.


With the development of modern nanoscience and nanotechnology, Bi1-xSbx can be synthesized into different nanoscale and nanostructured forms, including thin films, nanowires, nanotubes, nanoribbons, and many others. However, due to the strong correlation between electrons and holes at the L-point in the Brillouin zone, the direct band evolves in an anomalous manner under the quantum confinement when nanostructured. Due to the alloying and the low symmetry, predicting the L-point direct bandgap in a nanomaterial using either ab initio calculations or kp perturbations can be computationally costive or inaccurate. We here try to solve this problem using the machine learning methods, including the support vector regression, the regression tree, the Gaussian process regression, and the artificial neural network. A goodness-of-fit of ~0.99 can be achieved for Bi1-xSbx thin films and nanowires.


When rewritten in an appropriate manner, the microscopic Maxwell-Lorentz equations appear as a wavemechanical theory for photons, and their quantum physical interaction with matter. A natural extension leads from photon wave mechanics to quantum electrodynamics (QED). In its modern formulation photon wave mechanics has given us valuable new insight in subjects such as spatial photon localization, near-field photon dynamics, transverse photon mass, photon eikonal theory, photon tunneling, and rim-zone electrodynamics. The present review is based on my plenary lecture at the SPIE-Europe 2009 Optics and Optoelectronics International Symposium in Prague.


Tissue engineering has become one of the most studied medical fields and appears to be promising for the regeneration of injured bone tissues. Even though the bone has self-remodeling properties, bone regeneration may be required in some cases. Current research concerns materials employed to develop biological scaffolds with improved features as well as complex preparation techniques. Several attempts have been made to achieve compatible and osteoconductive materials with good mechanical strength in order to provide structural support. The application of biomaterials and mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) is a promising prospect for bone regeneration. Recently, various cells have been utilized alone or in combination with biomaterials to accelerate bone repair in vivo. However, the question of what cell source is the best for use in bone engineering remains open. This review focuses on studies that evaluated bone regeneration using biomaterials with MSCs. Different types of biomaterials for scaffold processing, ranging from natural and synthetic polymers to hybrid composites, are presented. These constructs demonstrated an enhanced ability to regenerate the bone in vivo using animal models. Additionally, future perspectives in tissue engineering, such as the MSC secretome, that is the conditioned medium (CM), and the extracellular vesicles (EVs), are also described in this review. This new approach has already shown promising results for bone tissue regeneration in experimental models.


Abstract Differences within a species in rates of growth of nestlings can be used as indicators of the quality of parental care, environmental conditions, and future success of offspring, whereas comparisons among different species may reflect a history of different ecological conditions or life-history strategies. The presesnt study examines the patterns of variation in growth in nestling Tree Swallows (Tachycineta bicolor) from across the species' range and compares Tree Swallows to other species. Growth of Tree Swallows was typical of other species in the family Hirundinidae. As a family, the Hirundinidae have slower growth than typical for passerines. Growth rate of species of Hirundinidae was not correlated with adult body mass or average brood size. Contrary to predictions, species that are double-brooded did not have higher growth rates, but swallow species living at higher latitudes did have higher growth rates than tropical species. Substantial variation in growth rates was observed among populations of Tree Swallows, yet the amount of variation observed between breeding colonies only a few kilometers apart, or from the same colony in different years, was as great as that seen in populations separated by hundreds of kilometers. Within a population, differences in growth among years were correlated with temperature and food supply when nestlings were being raised. No correlation between climate and growth was seen when comparing different populations. Differences between populations were not explained by local habitat, nor were large-scale geographic patterns evident. I used both experimental and observational evidence to evaluate the implications of short-term reduction in growth for subsequent growth and survival. Nestlings were slow to recover from even very short periods of delayed growth that occur early in the nestling phase. Return of nestlings with experimentally or naturally induced delayed growth was reduced, which suggests that short interruptions in growth may have long term effects on postfledging survival, even though mass at fledging is not affected.


Objective. To measure support for seasonal influenza vaccination requirements among US healthcare personnel (HCP) and its associations with attitudes regarding influenza and influenza vaccination and self-reported coverage by existing vaccination requirements. Design. Between lune 1 and June 30, 2010, we surveyed a sample of US HCP (n = 1,664) recruited using an existing probability-based online research panel of participants representing the US general population as a sampling frame. Setting. General community. Participants. Eligible HCP who (1) reported having worked as medical doctors, health technologists, healthcare support staff, or other health practitioners or who (2) reported having worked in hospitals, ambulatory care facilities, long-term care facilities, or other health-related settings. Methods. We analyzed support for seasonal influenza vaccination requirements for HCP using proportion estimation and multivariable probit models. Results. A total of 57.4% (95% confidence interval, 53.3%–61.5%) of US HCP agreed that HCP should be required to be vaccinated for seasonal influenza. Support for mandatory vaccination was statistically significantly higher among HCP who were subject to employer-based influenza vaccination requirements, who considered influenza to be a serious disease, and who agreed that influenza vaccine was safe and effective. Conclusions. A majority of HCP support influenza vaccination requirements. Moreover, providing HCP with information about the safety of influenza vaccination and communicating that immunization of HCP is a patient safety issue may be important for generating staff support for influenza vaccination requirements. Infect Control Hosp Epidemiol 2012;33(3):213-221


Anisotropy of Magnetic Susceptibility (AMS) is a valid tool to investigate magma flow direction within dikes. However, geometrically inverse magnetic fabric characterized by maximum magnetic susceptibility axis (kmax) perpendicular to the dike wall may complicate the interpretation of flow trajectories. To better understand the nature of this fabric, we present a multiscale study on 19 dikes (383 samples) in the Miocene Alftafjordur volcanic system (Iceland), where 80% of the samples show a geometrically inverse magnetic fabric. We carried out (1) AMS measurements at different magnetic fields and temperatures, along with Anisotropy of Anhysteretic Remanent Magnetization (AARM) analysis; (2) hysteresis loops and FORC diagrams; (3) thin section analysis; (4) structural fieldwork. A variable Ti‐content (0.1 < x < 0.6, Fe3‐xTixO4) titanomagnetite is the main magnetic carrier, and the contribution of the paramagnetic elongated crystals to the magnetic fabric is negligible. Single domain is not the prevailing domain state of the magnetic particles, suggesting that its occurrence cannot be the main cause for the inverse fabric. AMS analysis at different fields and temperatures along with AARM allow us to exclude any mineral phase change of the titanomagnetite across the dike. Nevertheless, kmax is parallel to a diffuse horizontal column‐like fracture pattern perpendicularly oriented with respect to the dike strike. This suggests that the Ti‐magnetite mineral orientation during dike cooling was affected by the fracture network progressively developing columnar basalts. This study demonstrates that the interpretation of AMS data on old and deep volcanic bodies is not straightforward and observations at different scales are required.


Cytokines and extracellular vesicles are two methods of initiating and maintaining cellular crosstalk. The role of cytokines in the initiation, progression, and resolution of inflammation has been well studied and more so, their pathophysiological role in the development of autoimmune disease. In recent years, the impact of extracellular vesicles on the progression of autoimmunity has become more widely appreciated. In this review, we discuss the mechanisms that allow extracellular vesicles of various sources to modulate cytokine production, and release, and how extracellular vesicles might be involved in the direct delivery and modulation of cytokine levels. Moreover, we explore what challenges are faced by current therapies and the promising future for extracellular vesicles as therapeutic agents in conditions driven by immune dysregulation.


Sedimentary zeolite occurrences are widespread in Central and Western Anatolia, Turkey. Erionite occurrences in Central Anatolia have significant health implications for inhabitants of the region. The widespread occurrences of zeolites are generally associated with volcano-sedimentary rocks and consist of low-temperature forms. The aim of the work was to define specifically the formation mechanism and chemical characteristics of these volcano-sedimentary deposits, and particularly, the stability conditions for erionite. The first step was to construct chemical potential diagrams and calculate thermodynamic data for erionite and Ca-saponite. Then, equilibrium activity diagrams were calculated for the zeolites and related minerals in the system of Ca-Na-K-Mg-Fe-Al-Si and H2O. Stability diagrams for log [aCa2+/(aH+)2] — log [aNa+/aH+] and log [aCa2+/(aH+)2] — log [aK+/aH+] for various saturation phase activities of Al3+ and SiO2 (aq) were plotted for sedimentary conditions. The coexisting phases and chemical characteristics of the each deposit were evaluated by examination of the activity diagrams. Deposits which do not include some of the common sedimentary zeolites, possibly have high Al3+ activity (equal to or greater than gibbsite saturation) or low SiO(aq) activity (less than quartz saturation) during formation. In addition, erionite was found to be very sensitive to the alkalinity of the system and is stable in only a limited range of thermochemical conditions.


recently. The original ulcer had healed. He was transfused with a total of six units of blood and made an uneventful recovery. The patient's claim, the witness of his relatives, and a return tablet count support compliance with therapy. His claim to abstinence from alcohol is supported by his relatives and the fact that his liver function tests had returned to normal. We were satisfied that no further gastric irritants had been ingested.


We develop a Bayesian framework for estimating high quantiles of the relative return loss distribution of equity portfolios. This framework allows for the incorporation of both quantitative data via a parametric model for the loss distribution as well as qualitative information, specified independent of the data, by the choice of a prior distribution over the model parameters. We apply these methods in the case of one and two dimensional models to estimate distribution parameters and associated error bounds from which 99% VaR values are estimated. Finally, we systematically apply our framework to four test portfolios, compute summary statistics related to model performance, and report the results.


The electronic structure of YBa2Cu3O6+x and La2−xSrxCuO4 for various values of x has been investigated using hard x-ray photoemission spectroscopy. The experimental results establish that the cleaving of YBa2Cu3O6+x compounds occurs predominantly in the BaCuO3 complex, leading to charged surfaces at higher x and to uncharged surfaces at lower x values. The bulk component of the core-level spectra exhibits a shift in binding energy as a function of x, from which a shift of the chemical potential as a function of hole concentration in the CuO2 layers could be derived. The doping dependence of the chemical potential across the transition from a Mott-Hubbard insulator to a Fermi-liquid-like metal is very different in these two series of compounds. In agreement with previous studies in the literature the chemical-potential shift in La2−xSrxCuO4 is close to zero for small hole concentrations. In YBa2Cu3O6+x, similar to all other doped cuprates studied so far, a strong shift of the chemical potential at low hole doping is detected. However, the results for the inverse charge susceptibility at small x shows a large variation between different doped cuprates. The results are discussed in view of various theoretical models. None of these models turns out to be satisfactory


We demonstrate that the Łojasiewicz theorem on the division of distributions by analytic functions carries over to the case of division by quasianalytic functions locally definable in an arbitrary polynomially bounded, o-minimal structure which admits smooth cell decomposition. Hence, in particular, the principal ideal generated by a locally definable quasianalytic function is closed in the Fréchet space of smooth functions.


The arid climate of many regions within Central Asia often leads to excellent archaeological preservation, especially in sealed funerary contexts, allowing for ancient DNA analyses. While geneticists have looked at human remains, clothes, tools, and other burial objects are often neglected. In this paper, we present the results of an ancient DNA study on Bronze Age leather objects excavated from tombs of the Wupu cemetery in the Hami Oasis and Yanghai cemetery in the Turpan Oasis, both in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of northwestern China. In addition to species identification of goat (Capra aegagrus/hircus), sheep (Ovis orientalis/aries), and cattle (Bos primigenius/taurus), mitochondrial haplogroups were determined for several samples. Our results show that Bronze Age domesticated goats and sheep from the Hami and Turpan oases possessed identical or closely related haplotypes to modern domestic animals of this area. The absence of leather produced from wild animals emphasizes the importance of animal husbandry in the cultures of Wupu and Yanghai.