The traditional approach of teaching Databases requires a great effort on the initial aspects of modeling and design that can negatively affect student's motivation. This consideration led us to propose a method able to motivate students. The paper presents an innovative method of teaching a Database course, as well as the results of its experience in an Italian high school. This method is based on a blended approach of the Extreme Apprenticeship methodology, jointly with a specific organization of the course topics, which, compared to the traditional organization, has been strongly adapted to the paradigm of Learning by Doing. Good results in terms of students' performance and in terms of level of learning perceived by the students have been achieved. The perceived level of learning achieved by the students has been measured through a questionnaire administered at the beginning, in the middle and at the end of the course. Blended eXtreme Apprenticeship; DataBase Teaching; Learning by Doing


Back grinding is the key working procedure in the silicon wafer manufacturing process. Ground silicon wafers ought to have low subsurface damage layer thickness (SSD ) and surface roughness value. It requires that the wheel should have high self-sharpening ability and consistent performance. In this paper, the research on pore-forming agent in order to improve the wheel's self-sharpening ability of the resin-bond diamond grinding was conducted. The research includes the pore-forming mechanism of various pore-forming agent, the influence of pore-forming agent's type and the effect on the bond's strength, the influence of pore-forming agent on the grinding performance of the wheel. Moreover, it examines the improved grinding wheel's grinding effect by grinding tests.


: Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to determine the market position of Polish milk producers based on a synthetic assessment of the profitability of dairy farms compared to their business partners in the European Union in 2013–2017. Design/Methodology/Approach: Source materials used in this analysis was 2013–2017 data for the "dairy cows" type of farming, as retrieved from the FADN. A synthetic characteristic was used to carry out a summary assessment of dairy farms' income situation; its value was determined without making a reference to an ideal solution. Findings: This study revealed the large complexity and heterogeneity of income situation of Union's milk producers. Only some farms engaged in milk production have enough income to be able to continue or develop milk production in the coming years. At the same time, a significant part of dairy farms find themselves in a poor income situation, as confirmed by a negative production profitability ratio. These farms will face considerable development challenges in the future. It follows from this study that some of the Polish dairy farms face major restructuring and modernization challenges. Also, a part of them are likely to discontinue milk production in the future. Practical implications: Findings from this study can be used by the Union's agricultural policymakers and by agricultural producers and their associations. The results identify the countries where dairy farms are likely to be competitive in the future and those where dairy farms face major development challenges. Originality/value: The results of this comparative analysis supplement previous research on the profitability of dairy farms. This paper proposes the use of linear ordering in assessing the profitability of dairy farms.


Olanzapine is a novel antipsychotic, approved for the acute and maintenance treatment of schizophrenia and bipolar I disorder. Despite the publicity regarding reported adverse events with the novel antipsychotics, such as weight gain and Type II diabetes mellitus, olanzapine remains a useful and important medicine. It is a selective monoaminergic antagonist with high-affinity binding to a number of receptors thought to be implicated in some psychotic and mood symptoms. The complex pharmacology of olanzapine has lead to studies exploring its use in treating substance abuse, aggression/violence, borderline personality disorder, schizotypal personality disorder, obsessive–compulsive disorder and as a neuroprotective agent in schizophrenia. As the pharmacology of olanzapine and other novel antipsychotics becomes better understood, future effective treatment strategies are likely to match an individual's genetic makeup and receptor profiles to the most compatible agent.


Theoretical analysis of machine intelligence (MI) is useful for defining a common platform in both theoretical and applied artificial intelligence (AI). The goal of this paper is to set canonical definitions that can assist pragmatic research in both strong and weak AI. Described epistemological features of machine intelligence include relationship between intelligent behavior, intelligent and unintelligent machine characteristics, observable and unobservable entities and classification of intelligence. The paper also establishes algebraic definitions of efficiency and accuracy of MI tests as their quality measure. The last part of the paper addresses the learning process with respect to the traditional epistemology and the epistemology of MI described here. The proposed views on MI positively correlate to the Hegelian monistic epistemology and contribute towards amalgamating idealistic deliberations with the AI theory, particularly in a local frame of reference.


Chronic and adult-onset GM2 gangliosidoses are neurological disorders caused by marked deficiency of the A isoenzyme of beta-hexosaminidase; they occur in the Ashkenazi Jewish population, though less frequently than classic (infantile) Tay-Sachs disease. Earlier biosynthetic studies had identified a defective alpha-subunit that failed to associate with the beta-subunit. We have now found a guanosine to adenosine transition at the 3' end of exon 7, which causes substitution of serine for glycine at position 269 of the alpha-subunit [designated 269 (Gly----Ser) substitution]. An RNase protection assay was used to localize the mutation to a segment of mRNA from fibroblasts of a patient with the adult-onset disorder. That segment of mRNA (after reverse transcription) and a corresponding segment of genomic DNA were amplified by the polymerase chain reaction and sequenced by the dideoxy method. The sequence analysis, together with an assay based on the loss of a ScrFI restriction site, showed that the patient was a compound heterozygote who had inherited the 269 (Gly----Ser) mutation from his father and an allelic null mutation from his mother. The 269 (Gly----Ser) mutation, in compound heterozygosity with a presumed null allele, was also found in fetal fibroblasts with an association-defective phenotype and in cells from five patients with chronic GM2 gangliosidosis. It was not found in beta-hexosaminidase A-deficient cells obtained from patients with infantile Tay-Sachs disease nor in cells from individuals who do not have beta-hexosaminidase A deficiency. However, there must be additional mutations with similar consequences, since the 269 (Gly----Ser) substitution was not present in fibroblasts from two patients with juvenile GM2 gangliosidosis even though these had an association-defective alpha-subunit.


This paper focuses on analyzing chaos in cave percolation water drip rates, which has implications for flow routing in fractured media and on the use of speleothems for paleoclimate reconstructions. It has been shown that the physics of dripping faucets involve a set of non‐linear equations leading to chaotic drip rate, meaning that, for a given drip rate, the interval between individual drops can vary greatly. It can be expected that drip waters supplying stalagmites show similar properties, and consequently the dependency between water flux and stalagmite growth rate or geochemistry could be more complicated than usually assumed. We used high‐frequency monitoring of two contrasting drips in a cave in Australia, and identified chaos in cave drip rate. Our findings also indicate that the occurrence of chaos can give insights into flow routing in fractured media.


Essay 1: We reexamine the effect of economic development on the level of democracy based on the data sets of Acemoglu et al. (2008) with a novel regression specification utilizing a zero-one-inflated beta distribution for the response variable democracy. Contrary to the results of Acemoglu et al. (2008), some support of causality is found particularly when explaining heteroscedasticity. We also find democracy is a bimodal variable and approximate the distribution using two separate samples of OECD and non-OECD countries. Our results indicate that higher incomes are associated with higher democracy levels in the OECD sub-sample, however for non-OECD the association is insignificant. Essay 2: Education is a strong predictor of economic performance. Educational inequality in opportunity could thus make a significant contribution to earning disparities. Following Ferrerira et al. (2014) parametric method, we construct aggregate indices of inequality in educational opportunities for thirteen Indonesian provinces in the years 1997, 2000 and 2007. The contribution of this paper is to define individual indices of the power of circumstances, which measure the effect that the accumulation of factors, outside individual control, has on individual educational achievements and earnings in the short and long run. We find that-for the period considered- there has been a declining trend in inequality of educational opportunities, albeit not in all provinces. Our findings also suggest that parental educational background is the most significant factor for school survival. Additionally, the effect that circumstances exert on future individual educational achievements and early earnings perspectives tends to persist over time, but only to a very small extent. Our causal model, which relates educational budget policy to equality of opportunity, shows that the educational budget has a negative impact on the youngest cohorts, thus causing us to question the effectiveness of the allocation of resources to primary and intermediate schools. Essay 3: In this paper, we evaluate the short run impact of two educational subsidies that were part of the fuel subsidy reduction compensation programs in Indonesia during the 2006/2007 academic year, namely BKM scholarships and BOS out-of-pocket expenses, on education outcomes and household expenditure. These are two different poverty-based targeting transfer programs that have been represented by one single treatment variable in our data source, the Indonesian Family Life Survey (IFLS), thus the clear identification of each program is very important to the disentanglement of the estimated effects. The evalution becomes complicated because there is an effect of the past scholarship program to be considered, as well as overlapping periods of two interventions and the presence of BOS in the higher hierarchy as the school focused intervention at the same time. Utilizing the combination of several methods, we find that targeting the poor was done inefficiently and that the transfer coverage was too small. In addition, we find that educational attainment increases, on average, by 4 months after one year of intervention for compulsory grades 1-9. This magnitude, however, is an upper bound of the effect of intervention accumulation over time and is most likely coming from the BOS spillover effect. We also observe crowding out household expenditure to anticipate the transfers. Finally, we find a positive relationship between past scholarship programs and educational attainment, which suggests that targeted subsidies also have a long term impact.


Biochemical and chemical studies were performed on some atypical lactobacilli from chicken meat in an attempt to clarify their taxonomy. The present study showed that the majority of the poultry strains could be allocated to the species Brochothrix thermosphacta, Lactobacillus divergens, and Lactobacillus piscicola. The majority of the remaining poultry strains fell into two distinct groups which were worthy of separate species status. Lactobacillus carnis was found to be a member of the species L. piscicola. On the basis of biochemical, physiological, and chemical criteria, we suggest that L. divergens, L. piscicola, and the two unidentified poultry taxa be classified in a new genus, Carnobacterium, as Carnobacterium divergens comb. nov., Carnobacterium piscicola comb. nov., Carnobacterium gallinarum sp. nov., and Carnobacterium mobile sp. nov. The type strains of C. gallinarum and C. mobile are NCFB 2766T and NCFB 2765T, respectively.


The study analyzed reality television programmes and ascertained Nigerian students' perception of the programmes. Data were also generated with a 22-item self-developed questionnaire with a reliability of 0.81 established using Cronbach's coefficient alpha. The instrument was administered on 388 respondents drawn from six different Universities across the six states in the South-South geo-political zone of Nigeria using a simple random sampling technique. The results show that reality television programmes are produced with educational contents meant to teach the audience skills being performed or perfected by the contestants and the programmes helps audience members to learn things about other people. The study concludes that reality television programmes have serious influences on audience members as they desire to be like the people they watch in the programmes. Again, to a great extent, many reality television audience members do believe that what they watch in the programmes are real life situations and not mere acting. Therefore, it is recommended, among other things that since reality television programmes enable audience members to learn things about others when they watch contestants in the programmes, producers must ensure that reality television programmes aired on Nigerian television stations are those capable of impacting positively on the lifestyles of Nigerians, especially University students.


The purpose of this article is to present a set of experiences and challenges related to the current Buzios FPSOs and the perspectives offered by these related experiences, which should drive further enhancements for next generations of pre-salt production units.
 Buzios field is a giant oil discovery located at Brazilian southeast coast and has four production systems already in operation: P-74, P-75, P-76 and P-77. Throughout these projects, Petrobras observed technical and business opportunities that are going to lead improvements for next generation of Buzios field's FPSOs. These include enhancements on high production wells, H2S removal technology, vessel standardization, digital transformation solutions, design procedures improvements and several measures to strength the integration between design, construction, commissioning and operation phases.
 During the construction, commissioning and startup period of the Buzios' current installed units, Petrobras identified technical issues that should be addressed in order to add value to the next generation of Buzios' FPSOs. These experiences point out to the need of technical design improvements and reviews such as: change in technology of H2S removal from solid bed to membranes; a complete analysis of hull capacities and dimensions and standardization of the vessel; and a set of standardization methods and processes to develop the basic design - including aspects of digital transformation. The result was a standard design project called Reference Project ("Projeto de Referência" in Portuguese) that intends to be a reference for new units to be installed in Buzios field. This design also intends to be the basis to other projects in order to allow faster business decisions.


Exploiting parallelism is becoming more and more important in designing efficient solvers for computationally hard problems. However, manually building parallel solvers typically requires considerable domain knowledge and plenty of human effort. As an alternative, automatic construction of parallel portfolios (ACPP) aims at automatically building effective parallel portfolios based on a given problem instance set and a given rich configuration space. One promising way to solve the ACPP problem is to explicitly group the instances into different subsets and promote a component solver to handle each of them. This paper investigates solving ACPP from this perspective, and especially studies how to obtain a good instance grouping. The experimental results on two widely studied problem domains, the boolean satisfiability problems (SAT) and the traveling salesman problems (TSP), showed that the parallel portfolios constructed by the proposed method could achieve consistently superior performances to the ones constructed by the state-of-the-art ACPP methods, and could even rival sophisticated hand-designed parallel solvers.


BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: Early identification and treatment of severe sepsis and septic shock improves outcomes. We sought to identify and evaluate children with possible sepsis on a pediatric medical/surgical unit through successful implementation of a sepsis identification pathway. METHODS: The sepsis identification pathway, a vital sign screen and subsequent physician evaluation, was implemented in October 2013. Quality improvement interventions were used to improve physician and nursing adherence with the pathway. We reviewed charts of patients with positive screens on a monthly basis to assess for nursing recognition/physician notification, physician evaluation for sepsis, and subsequent physician diagnosis of sepsis and severe sepsis/septic shock. Adherence data were analyzed on a run chart and statistical process control p-chart. RESULTS: Nursing and physician pathway adherence of >80% was achieved over a 6-month period and sustained for the following 6 months. The direction of improvements met standard criteria for special causes. Over a 1-year period, there were 963 admissions to the unit. Positive screens occurred in 161 (16.7%) of these admissions and 38 (23.5%) of these had a physician diagnosis of sepsis, severe sepsis, or septic shock. One patient with neutropenia and septic shock had a negative sepsis screen due to lack of initial fever. CONCLUSIONS: Using quality improvement methodology, we successfully implemented a sepsis identification pathway on our pediatric unit. The pathway provided a standardized process to identify and evaluate children with possible sepsis requiring timely evaluation and treatment.


The purpose of the study was to increase the thermal conductivity of multilayered and self-sealing ceramic matrix composites via the silicon melt infiltration process. The first step of the process consisted in filling porosity using various organic xerogels by the sol-gel route. Carbon xerogels obtained by subsequent pyrolysis may reduce and homogenize the porous network within the composite. Cracking of the xerogels due to volumic shrinkage occurring during air drying may be decreased by controlling the initial parameters as concerns the gel solution and/or by operating a second impregnation/pyrolysis step. Filling of such composites by liquid silicon revealed that a specific route and particular conditions are necessary to eliminate porosity by controlling gas production species from pore surface at high temperature. This may be achieved through a directional flow and using highly viscous silicon (thanks to a localized wick), and by keeping the sides of the materials permeable to gas. This led to composite materials with a thermal conductivity which was four times as high as that of those materials densified via CVI. An increase in mechanical properties was also observed.


In this work we report a physical deposition-based, one-step quantum dot (QD) synthesis and assembly on ternary metal oxide nanowires for photovoltaic applications. Typical solution-based synthesis of colloidal QDs for QD sensitized solar cells involves nontrivial ligand exchange processing and toxic wet chemicals, and the effect of the ligands on carrier transport has not been fully understood. In this research using pulsed laser deposition, CdSe QDs were coated on Zn(2)SnO(4) nanowires without ligand molecules, and the coverage could be controlled by adjusting the laser fluence. Growth of QDs in dense nanowire network structures was also achieved, and photovoltaic cells fabricated using this method exhibited promising device performance. This approach could be further applied for the assembly of QDs where ligand exchange is difficult and could possibly lead to reduced fabrication cost and improved device performance.


We have carried out a Gal4 enhancer trap screen in zebrafish, and have generated 184 stable transgenic lines with interesting expression patterns throughout the nervous system. Of these, three display clear expression in the tectum, each with a distinguishable and stereotyped distribution of Gal4 expressing cells. Detailed morphological analysis of single cells, using a genetic "Golgi-like" labelling method, revealed four common cell types (superficial, periventricular, shallow periventricular, and radial glial), along with a range of other less common neurons. The shallow periventricular (PV) and a subset of the PV neurons are tectal efferent neurons that target various parts of the reticular formation. We find that it is specifically PV neurons with dendrites in the deep tectal neuropil that target the reticular formation. This indicates that these neurons receive the tectum's highly processed visual information (which is fed from the superficial retinorecipient layers), and relay it to premotor regions. Our results show that the larval tectum, both broadly and at the single cell level, strongly resembles a miniature version of its adult counterpart, and that it has all of the necessary anatomical characteristics to inform motor responses based on sensory input. We also demonstrate that mosaic expression of GFP in Gal4 enhancer trap lines can be used to describe the types and abundance of cells in an expression pattern, including the architectures of individual neurons. Such detailed anatomical descriptions will be an important part of future efforts to describe the functions of discrete tectal circuits in the generation of behavior.


Within soundscape research, audio visualisations are generally targeted towards scientific audiences and not produced with artistic intentions. Machine learning is utilised in this field to increase efficiency when dealing with large amounts of data, recognizing patterns, and classifying audio. Although machine learning is effective for these purposes, it also offers image synthesis capabilities which have not been taken advantage of in current audio visualisation production. This research aims to answer the question, 'How might machine learning image synthesis be used to visualise soundscape audio?'.
Through an iterative design process, a design pipeline was developed to generate visualisations of audio using Pix2Pix (Isola, et al., 2016), a conditional adversarial neural network. Through a process of extracting audio features, converting these into simple grid images and feeding them into a trained machine learning model, a new visual interpretation of the audio can be experienced in the form of images and videos. The video design outputs communicate visual change of audio through the interrelated transformation of colour, shape, detail, and size of flower-like figures. These outputs aim to bring attention to the value of soundscapes through visually demonstrating their unique qualities. The method developed has not been previously documented according to the available literature and marks an exciting exploration of the new application of machine learning image-to-image translation as a creative tool for audio visualisation.


The model generalizes the classical concept of the world's technological frontier. The article is devoted to the theory of comparative analysis of the efficiency of national economies using the non-parametric method of data shell analysis (DEA). The proposed model summarizes the classical concept of the world's technological frontier. Algebraically, it is the solution to the well-known linear programming problem, which determines the countries that use the best combinations of capital and labour to produce a unit of output. Geometrically, it is the envelopment of the states of the studied countries in the plane of relative volumes of factors of production ("technological plane"). Authors add to this problem three other problems and the classical equation of nominal national income distribution between the factors of production. The first of these problems identifies countries that have the best combinations of real labour and capital prices. Analogously, the geometric solution to this problem authors defined the world economic frontier. It is the envelopment of the states of countries in the plane of real prices of production factors ("economic plane"). The other two frontiers consist of countries with the best combinations of parameters of the national function of product price distribution and product volume distributions between labour and capital. The economic frontier, built by the envelopment method of the price distribution function, can be depicted on the technological plane as an envelopment of the worst technological conditions. Similarly, the technological frontier, built by the envelopment method of product distribution functions, can be depicted on the economic plane as the shell of the worst economic conditions. Approbation of the model on data from 13 countries in 2017 revealed a geographical axis in the direction of "northwest-southeast" on the European continent.


Mutation or functional inactivation of tumour suppressors represents a key event in the transformation of cells and contributes to the development of cancer. P300 and CBP constitute two histone acetyltransferases with tumour suppressor functions that are frequently mutated or functional inactivated in cancer. Accordingly, after chemotherapy-induced DNA damage, for example, p300 and CBP can co-activate the key tumour suppressor proteins p53 and TAp73, thereby contributing to tumour cell apoptosis.
Here we investigated the impact of the co-factor protein iASPP on p300 and TAp73 function, after treatment of tumourigenic cell lines with the chemotherapeutic drug cisplatin. iASPP belongs to the ASPP-family, another class of co-factors that contribute to p53-family-mediated apoptosis induction. Direct interaction of iASPP with p300 and TAp73 has been revealed before; functional consequences of these interactions remain elusive though and are therefore subject of our analyses.
By investigating the consequences of stable iASPP knockdown in tumourigenic cell lines, we found that direct interaction of iASPP and p300 in cisplatin-treated cells led to enhanced protein stability of p300 and TAp73. Correspondingly, iASPP depletion resulted in decreased protein amounts of p300, reduced induction of pro-apoptotic p73 target genes and impaired apoptosis.
BRMS1 represents a recently discovered E3 ubiquitin ligase for p300. Hence, we observed that BRMS1 depletion rescued the degradation of p300 and CBP in cisplatin-treated, iASPP-depleted cells. Therefore, we hypothesize that BRMS1 inhibition constitutes the molecular mechanism underlying the increased protein stability of p300 in the presence of iASPP. Furthermore, we discovered, that malignant melanoma are characterized by down-regulated iASPP expression level. Follow-up studies on melanoma cell lines revealed that low iASPP expression correlated with decreased protein levels of p300 in cisplatin-treated cells. BRMS1 knockdown in some of these cell lines could up-regulate p300 protein level, suggesting that down-regulation of iASPP expression leads to functional inactivation of p300 in melanoma, by allowing BRMS1 activity on p300. Treatment of the cells with the MKP-1 inhibitor BCI, could re-establish p300 level and induce p300-dependent apoptosis by yet unknown mechanisms.
Summing up, iASPP represents a regulator for p300 function. It contributes to p300-dependent apoptosis induction by enhancing its protein stability after DNA damage. Re-establishment of p300 levels in low iASPP-expressing melanoma might represent a novel strategy to overcome chemoresistance.


From 1993 to 2007, a total of 11,605 malaria cases were reported to the Robert Koch-Institut. For 9 593 of these cases information on the possible country of infection is available. Analysis of the data indicates that the malaria cases were imported to Germany from 96 countries. The majority of the malaria cases were acquired in Africa, followed by distinctly fewer cases from Asian countries. More than half of all cases were imported from only 6 countries (Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Cameroon, Gambia, and India). The number of cases imported from, e.g., Kenya and India has declined, whereas infections from Ghana, Nigeria, and Cameroon have increased during the last years. For more than two-thirds of all infections the predominant parasite species was P. falciparum; this is consistent with the predominance of the African continent as the main source of infection.


Future reauthorizations of the federal transportation bill will require a comprehensive and quantitative analysis of the freight benefits of proposed freight system projects. To prioritize public investments in freight systems and to insure consideration of the contribution of freight to the overall system performance, states and regions need an improved method to analyze freight benefits associated with proposed highway and truck intermodal improvements that would lead to enhanced trade and sustainable economic growth, improved safety and environmental quality, and goods delivery in Washington State. This project develops a process to address this need by building on previous and ongoing research by some project team members with the goal of developing an agency-friendly, data-supported framework to prioritize public investments for freight systems in Washington and Oregon. The project integrates two ongoing Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) funded efforts: one to create methods to calculate the value of truck and truck-intermodal infrastructure projects and the other to collect truck probe data from commercial global positioning system (GPS) devices to create a statewide Freight Performance Measures (FPM) program. This integration informs the development of a framework that allows public agencies to quantify freight investment benefits in specific areas such as major freight corridors and across borders.


Abstract Existential phenomenology addresses the idea of vision as an embodied and meaningful activity. Within this schema, perception is already informed by the sensory intentionality of the living being that is setting itself within a dialectical and dialogical relation to the world. In such an understanding of experience, cinematic vision is positioned within the individual and historical person who interacts with a screen that itself reflects an existential relation between body and world. But what happens when digital images present entities and spaces that are physically not part of this world? How, in other words, do computational structures affect cinema's relation with reality? This article examines arguments concerned with the relation between digital media and corporeality, filtering them through the work of André Bazin, Roland Barthes, and Gilles Deleuze. From the point of view exhibited by Christian Volckman's Renaissance (2006), it questions the idea that digital cinema is a one-way ticket to incorporeality, suggesting that the new technology does in fact retain the ability to matter through nuances specific to its own constructions.


Organisational capital refers broadly to internal practices, processes and systems that enable firms to generate value. This paper presents an updated experimental estimate of organisational capital in the Australian market sector, derived using the standard expenditure approach for measuring intangible capital. We find that business investment in organisational capital in Australia is significant and fast growing. The relative share of organisational capital stock increased dramatically during the 1990s when compared to physical capital, but has since been gradually retreating over the last decade or so. This pattern appears to reflect similar trends in business function outsourcing and the uptake of enabling technologies over the same period.


The article is devoted to the evolution of the foreign trade relations of Russia during the reign of Mikhail
Romanov (1613-1645). The author analyzes the routes of foreign trade, the range of export goods, social
composition of the merchants, the changes of foreign trade geography. The special attention is paid to
the impact of the Russian Orthodox Church in the development of foreign trade.


Large-scale proteomic approaches have identified numerous mitochondrial acetylated proteins; however in most cases, their regulation by acetyltransferases and deacetylases remains unclear. Sirtuin 3 (SIRT3) is an NAD+-dependent mitochondrial protein deacetylase that has been shown to regulate a limited number of enzymes in key metabolic pathways. Here, we use a rigorous label-free quantitative MS approach (called MS1 Filtering) to analyze changes in lysine acetylation from mouse liver mitochondria in the absence of SIRT3. Among 483 proteins, a total of 2,187 unique sites of lysine acetylation were identified after affinity enrichment. MS1 Filtering revealed that lysine acetylation of 283 sites in 136 proteins was significantly increased in the absence of SIRT3 (at least twofold). A subset of these sites was independently validated using selected reaction monitoring MS. These data show that SIRT3 regulates acetylation on multiple proteins, often at multiple sites, across several metabolic pathways including fatty acid oxidation, ketogenesis, amino acid catabolism, and the urea and tricarboxylic acid cycles, as well as mitochondrial regulatory proteins. The widespread modification of key metabolic pathways greatly expands the number of known substrates and sites that are targeted by SIRT3 and establishes SIRT3 as a global regulator of mitochondrial protein acetylation with the capability of coordinating cellular responses to nutrient status and energy homeostasis.


Monolayer jacutingaite (Pt$_2$HgSe$_3$) has been recently identified as a candidate quantum spin Hall system with a 0.5 eV band gap, but no transport measurements have been performed so far on this material, neither in monolayer nor in the bulk. By using a dedicated high-pressure technique, we grow crystals enabling the exfoliation of 50-100 nm thick layers and the realization of devices for controlled transport experiments. Magnetoresistance measurements indicate that jacutingaite is a semimetal, exhibiting Shubnikov-de Haas (SdH) resistance oscillations with a multi-frequency spectrum. We adapt the Lifshitz-Kosevich formula to analyze quantitatively the SdH resistance oscillations in the presence of multiple frequencies, and find that the experimental observations are overall reproduced well by band structure ab-initio calculations for bulk jacutingaite. Together with the relatively high electron mobility extracted from the experiments ($\approx 2000$ cm$^2$/Vs, comparable to what is observed in WTe$_2$ crystals of the same thickness), our results indicate that monolayer jacutingaite --once successfully exfoliated-- will likely provide an excellent platform to investigate transport in 2D quantum spin Hall systems.


Eye movement recordings from reading are one of the richest signals of human language processing. Corpora of eye movements during reading of contextualized running text is a way of making such records available for natural language processing purposes. Such corpora already exist in some languages. We present CopCo, the Copenhagen Corpus of eye tracking recordings from natural reading of Danish texts. It is the first eye tracking corpus of its kind for the Danish language. CopCo includes 1,832 sentences with 34,897 tokens of Danish text extracted from a collection of speech manuscripts. This first release of the corpus contains eye tracking data from 22 participants. It will be extended continuously with more participants and texts from other genres. We assess the data quality of the recorded eye movements and find that the extracted features are in line with related research. The dataset available here: https://osf.io/ud8s5/.


Plants are widely used in Panama and Central America to cure different diseases, including malaria and amoebic dysentery. Cephaëlis ipecacuanha of the famiiy Rubiaceae contains emetine, which is used in the treatment of severe amoebic dysentery. Species of Rubiaceae, Simaroubaceae, Meliaceae and Menispermaceae have been examined, they are known to contain isoquinoline alkaloids, quassinoids, limonoids and bisbenzylisoquinoline (bbiq) alkaloids, respectively, with activity against Plasmodium falciparum. In order to obtain antiprotozoal natural products such as quassinoids, limonoids, bbiq's and emetine reiated alkaloids it was decided to investigate the following plants: Guarea macropetaia, G. rhopalocarpa, Ruagea glabra (Meliaceae); Abuta dwyerana (Menispermaceae); Cephaëlis camponutans, 0. dichroa, 0. dimorphandrloldes, 0. glomerulata, Laslanthus panamensis (Rubiaceae); PIcramnIa antldesma subsp. fessonia, P. teapensis (Simaroubaceae). Extracts from different parts of the plants were fractionated and tested against brine shrimp and KB ceils. Four plants were chemically studied and the isoiated compounds were characterized by mass spectra, infrared, ultraviolet, and NMR, also, two dimensional NMR experiments such as COSY-45, HMQC, HMBC and ROESY. Circular dichroism was used to establish the absolute configuration of some of the compounds. C. camponutans yielded benz[g]isoquinoline-5,10-dione, isolated for the first time from the plant kingdom, and a the new 1-OHbenzoisochromanquinone. Both compounds showed activity against brine shrimp, KB ceils and Plasmodium falciparum, in vitro. C. dichroa yielded six indole monoterpenoid aikaloids, including strictosidine, strictosamide, angustine, vallesiachotamine, iso-vallesiachotamine and the novel vallesiachotamine lactone. In contrast, 0. glomerulata yielded three new quinoline alkaloids. named, glomerulatine A, B and C. The taxonomic position of Cephaëlis is unclear and more detailed information on the constituent alkaloids may prove valuable in unravelling this problem. The butanolic fraction from de leaves of P. antldesma subsp. fessonia, showed strong activity against KB cells and yielded two known anthraquinones (aloe-emodin, aloe-emodinanthrone) and three new C-glycoside of aloe-emodin, named picramnioside A, B and C. The C-glycosides showed activity against KB cells. A cytotoxic microwell test using Anemia salina (brine shrimp) was developed in order to overcome some of the disadvantages of the previously described method. The test was predictive of cytotoxicity and compounds with activity on the nervous system were inactive. The activity of the quassinoids against KB cell and P. falciparum parallel the activity against brine shrimp.


With the steady stream of new web based information technologies being introduced to organizations, the need for network and communication technologies to provide an easy integration of knowledge and information sharing is essential.Network and Communication Technology Innovations for Web and IT Advancement presents studies on trends, developments, and methods on information technology advancements through network and communication technology. This collection brings together integrated approaches for communication technology and usage for web and IT advancements.


Advanced development of computer network through Internet brings the technology to Manufacturing. Increasing the demand for effectively use of the production facility requires the tools for sharing the manufacturing facility by remote operation of the machining process. This paper introduces the methodology of machining technology for direct remote operation of networked milling machine. The tools including virtual simulation using CAD model, remote desktop protocol and Setup Free Attachment for remote operation of milling process are proposed. Accessing and monitoring of machining operation is performed by remote desktop interface and 3D virtual simulations. Capability of remote operation is supported by an auto setup attachment with a reconfigurable pin type setup free technology installed on the table of CNC milling machine to perform unattended machining process. The system is designed using a computer server and connected to a PC based controlled CNC machine for real time monitoring. A client will access the server through internet communication and virtually simulate the machine activity. The result has been presented that combination between real time virtual simulation and remote desktop tool is enabling to operate all machine tool functions and as well as workpiece setup.


ABSTRACT Major orogenesis affected the southern rim of the Gulf basin during Late Paleozoic, Mid-Cretaceous, and Laramide times. Post-Laramide deformation has been dominantly epeirogenic or fault movements of normal or strike-slip character. A surprisingly large number of the tectonic features of southern Mexico and northern Central America are continuous beneath the adjacent Gulf of Mexico and/or Caribbean Sea. The following examples are cited: (1) Zacatecas zone--boundary of zones 3 and 4 of Bryant et al. (1968), (2) Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt-Teziutlan massif--southern limit of zone 4 of Bryant et al.--Pera Salient--Progreso shear zone of northern Yucatan--Yucatan Channel uplift, (3) Ticul Fault and Nuevo-Arenas swell, (4) Maya Mountains--Glovers Reef High--Cayman/Misteriosa Ridge--Sierra Maestra of Cuba, (5) San Cristobal--Comitan Fault Zones--Chixoy-Polochic and Motagua Fault Zones--Bonacca Ridge, (6) Ulua Graben of Honduras--downfaulting of continental margins of British Honduras and Quintana Roo. Evaporate deposits are widespread in the southern Gulf. Diapirs are common in the Isthmian region of Mexico and extend northward to the Sigsbee Deep west of the Campeche Banks. Probable salt ridges are found in Bryant et al. zones 1-4. Significant quantities of Cretaceous evaporites underlie the Yucatan platform and may extend northward beneath the Campeche bank. Salt diapirs are known to occur in Cuba. It is postulated that the salt in the Isthmian Basin of Mexico may also be of Cretaceous age and continuous with the Yucatan deposits. The age and distribution of the salt are critical in understanding the Mesozoic history of the southern Gulf. It is doubtful that appreciable quantities of evaporites underlie easternmost Yucatan or occur in the Yucatan basin (northern Caribbean) but more detailed knowledge of this area is necessary. Cretaceous evaporites are known to occur in Guatemala and it is possible that they may extend beneath the northern Caribbean. End_of_Record - Last_Page 321-------


wind fields DTU Orbit (18/11/2019) A time-space synchronization of coherent Doppler scanning lidars for 3D measurements of wind fields This thesis consists of the results of a Ph.D. study that was focused on the development of the system of three time-space synchronized pulsed coherent Doppler scanning lidars, which are coordinated by a remote 'master computer'. This system has the unique capability to measure a complete three-dimensional flow field by emitting the laser beams from the three spatially separated lidars, directing them to intersect, and moving the beam intersection over an area of interest. Each individual lidar was engineered to be powered by two real servo motors, and one virtual stepper motor. The stepper motor initiates the laser pulse emission and acquisition of the backscattered light, while the two servo motors conduct the scanner head rotation that provides means to direct the laser pulses into the atmosphere. By controlling the rotation of the three motors from the motion controller the strict synchronization and time control of the emission, steering and acquisition were achieved, resulting that the complete lidar measurement process is controlled from the single hardware component. The system was formed using a novel approach, in which the master computer simultaneously coordinates the remote lidars through a UDP/IP and TCP/IP network by exchange of network packets. Since the size of the packets is roughly 1 kB, this approach allows an uninterrupted and fast coordination of the lidars, even in the case of mobile networks such as GSM. With this approach a maximum lag of 10 ms was observed in terms of the scanner heads' rotation and the measurements among the lidars in the system. The laser beam pointing accuracy of each lidar was estimated to ±0.5° for the laser beam direction, and roughly ±5 m for the sensing distance. A set of procedures were proposed that can improve the pointing accuracy by a factor of 20. Subsequently, two experiments were carried out in which the developed multiple lidars system was used to synchronously measure wind velocity fields in multiple points in the atmosphere.


Results of a 1985 survey of California hardwood rangeland landowners were used to develop a multi-agency research and extension program known as the Integrated Hardwood Range Management Program. In 1992, the same properties were re-surveyed. Although the results cannot prove the program is the sole or direct agent of change, program-sponsored education and research aimed at encouraging oak rangeland owners to change oak management practices is reflected in changes in key landowner behaviors. Program-sponsored research showed that intermediate levels of oak canopy cover did not significantly reduce forage production. Concurrently, landowners have significantly reduced the clearing of oaks for forage production. Other significant changes are reduction of cutting of living oaks for any reason, reduced cutting of oaks for fuelwood, increased use of oak promoting practices, and a growing awareness of the need to be concerned about the status of oaks. Landowners who were aware of the resource benefits of having oaks, or who believed oaks were threatened, or who had been in contact with a natural resource advisory service were significantly more likely to carry out oak-promoting practices. Between 1985 and 1992, many properties changed hands: 24% of parcels were sold but remained intact, while an additional 11% were subdivided. As was found in 1985, owners of smaller properties manage for different and more diverse goals than those of larger properties. The changing pattern of hardwood rangeland land ownership will have an impact on education and conservation programs.


The interaction of gravitationally driven, free-surface flows of viscous fluid with topographic features is investigated theoretically. The motion is studied in the regime where the depth of the flow is much smaller than the streamwise extent of the topography. A lubrication model of the motion is developed, integrated numerically and analysed asymptotically. For small mounds, it is shown that the flow surmounts the obstacles, but for larger mounds the flow is deflected around it and can form dry zones in its wake into which fluid does not flow, as well as forming deeper ponded regions upstream. Which of these phenomena prevails is shown to depend upon the amplitude of the mound height and the thickness of the oncoming flow relative to the streamwise length scale over which the topography varies. By using numerical and asymptotic results, we demonstrate that relatively wide mounds lead to the development of deep ponds of material upstream, which may lead to flow overtopping if the mound is not sufficiently high. These insights can be used to inform the design of barriers that defend built infrastructures from lava flows, and it is shown how this model can also provide an upper bound on the force exerted by the flow on them.


This paper describes the development of the CNIX multiprocessor environment, that is specifically designed for the efficient execution of distributed genetic algorithms on clusters of UNIX work stations. CNIX is based around the TCP/IP client-server model and consists of two sets of `C++' libraries functions. The CNIX libraries provide a standard `C++' compiler with the necessary code to establish a multithreaded multiprocessor genetic algorithm environment. The first library migrates the major architectural features of the Transputer, along with selected instructions, to provide hardware independent parallel processing between multiple workstations and message passing communications across local area networks. The second library supplies a genetic algorithm tool kit to allow application programmers and engineers, with a basic knowledge of `C++', to construct distributed genetic algorithm using a set of simple set of instructions. Results show that CNIX is capable of executing parallel programs over groups of UNIX workstations while achieving a multiprocessor speedup of up to 95%. Performance tests running distributed genetic algorithms across 16 workstations have demonstrated a speed-up of 15 compared to sequential `C+ +' versions.


The center of generic diversity of the monocot family Xyridaceae is northern South America, where four of the five genera are endemic. Many species of these four small genera have restricted distributions and have not been critically studied, including the monospecific genus Aratitiyopea. Populations of this unusual Xyridaceae occur in mid-elevation, forested montane sites. Most Xyridaceae occur in exposed habitats, and although they are at least seasonally wet, many species exhibit xeromorphic adaptations. In contrast, Aratitiyopea presents a morphology and internal anatomy of a mesophyte (trailing stems, leaves with a relatively broad lamina, little mechanical tissue, and lacking a hypodermis, the latter two features present in other Xyridaceae with bifacial leaves) as well as effects of seasonal drying (cell death in the root and thickened endodermal cell walls). Structural details of the vegetative body of Aratitiyopea are presented here, and compared to that known for other Xyridaceae. Although the "gestalt" of Aratitiyopea is aberrant in Xyridaceae, it is structurally consistent with the family, and unusual features are interpreted as adaptations to its habitat, which few other Xyridaceae occupy.


The morphological and biochemical attributes of two organisms, American Type Culture Collection (ATCC) strains 190 and 6627, originally identified as Bordetella pertussis, were studied. The guanine-plus-cytosine content of the deoxyribonucleic acid of each strain is 60 mol%. The deoxyribonucleic acid homology between the two strains is 99%. The strains are quite similar phenotypically and genetically, and they are regarded here as belonging to one and the same species. Although the two strains produce pertucin, a bacteriocin active against B. pertussis strains in the smooth phase, they possess the characteristics of the genus Pseudomonas as defined by Shewan and Haynes. However, ATCC 190 and 6627 could not be placed in any of the Pseudomonas species described in the literature. Therefore, these strains are regarded as belonging to a new species, for which we propose the new name Pseudomonas pertucinogena. The type strain of P. pertucinogena is ATCC 190.


The speed of a multiplier is very important to any Digital Signal Processor (DSPs). This paper presents the efficiency of Urdhva Triyagbhyam Vedic method for multiplication, which strikes a difference in the actual process of multiplication itself. Vedic Mathematics is the earliest method of Indian mathematics which has a unique technique of calculations based on 16 Formulae. In this paper, a high performance, high throughput and area efficient architecture of a MAC architecture using Vedic multiplier for the Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGAs) is proposed. This paper presents the efficiency of Urdhva Triyagbhyam Vedic method for multiplication, which strikes a difference in the actual process of multiplication itself. It enables parallel generation of partial products and eliminates unwanted multiplication steps. Multiplier architecture is based on generating all partial products and their sums in one step. Chipscope VIO is used to give random inputs of desired values by user, on which proposed Vedic multiplication is performed. The proposed algorithm is modeled using VHDL i.e. Very High Speed integrated circuit hardware description language. The propagation time of the proposed architecture is found quiet less. The Xilinx Chipscope VIO generator allows us to give the runtime inputs. The Xilinx Chipscope tool will be used to test the FPGA inside results while the logic running on FPGA. The Xilinx Spartan 3 Family FPGA development board will be used for this circuit. The proposed multiplier implemented using Vedic multiplication is efficient and competent in terms of area and speed compared to its implementation using Array and Booth multiplier architectures. The results clearly indicate that Urdhava Tiryakbhyam can have a great impact on improving the speed of Digital Signal Processors.


Objectives
This study aims to evaluate the cardiopulmonary functions and exercise performance of patients with ankylosing spondylitis (AS) and to investigate the relationship between these parameters and disease activity, spine mobility and quality of life (QoL).

Patients and methods
Forty-five patients with AS (group 1; 33 males, 12 females; mean age 43.1±12.1 years; range 22 to 70 years) and 30 control subjects (group 2; 23 males, 7 females; mean age 42.8±10.0; range 23 to 70 years) were included in the study. Disease activity was assessed with the Bath Ankylosing Spondylitis Disease Activity Index and spinal mobility measures with the Bath Ankylosing Spondylitis Metrology Index (BASMI). The Ankylosing Spondylitis Quality of Life (ASQoL) Questionnaire and the Maastricht Ankylosing Spondylitis Enthesitis Score (MASES) were used. The pulmonary function test (PFT) and cardiopulmonary exercise testing (CPET) were performed.

Results
There was no significant difference between groups 1 and 2 in terms of mean age. The peak expiratory flow value in PFT was significantly lower in group 1 (p<0.05). In group 1, the duration of CPET was significantly shorter, and maximum work load and metabolic equivalent were significantly lower than in group 2 (p<0.001). Maximum oxygen uptake (VO2max) in peak responses, work and heart rate were significantly lower in group 1. The duration of CPET and maximum work were negatively correlated with age and BASMI (p<0.001). VO2max was negatively correlated with age, MASES and ASQoL (p<0.05).

Conclusion
There was no significant difference in PFT parameters between the groups. On the other hand, CPET parameters were significantly lower in the AS group. While CPET parameters are affected by spinal mobility, declining aerobic capacity affects QoL.


Queueing systems with random resource requirements, in which an arriving customer, in addition to a server, demands a random amount of resources from a shared resource pool, have proved useful to analyze wireless communication networks. The stationary distributions of such queuing systems are expressed in terms of truncated convolution powers of the cumulative distribution function of the resource requirements. Discretization of the cumulative distribution function and the application of the fast Fourier transform are a traditional way of calculating convolutions. We suggest finding truncated convolution powers of the cumulative distribution functions by calculating the convolution powers of the truncated cumulative distribution functions via fast Fourier transform. This radically decreases computational complexity. We introduce the concept of resource load and investigate the accuracy of the proposed method at low and high resource loads. It is shown that the proposed method makes it possible to quickly and accurately calculate truncated convolution powers required for the analysis of queuing systems with random resource requirements.


Infinite circular corrugated waveguide is analysed to investigate its ability to support modes with backward wave behaviour. Such waveguides provide an alternative structure, easier to manufacture than those already reported based on rectangular symmetry with corrugated walls or filled with frequency selective surfaces. The corrugations if sufficiently deep provide a guiding structure with the required series capacitance and shunt inductance to allow left-handed propagation within some frequency bands. These backward waves are analysed using the surface impedance model of propagation in corrugated waveguides to predict their properties. Interpreting the physical meaning of the analysis, the authors discuss how backward waves are related to resonances in corrugated structures. The relationship between power flows in the guide and the behaviour of the group velocity for such guides is shown. A full wave simulator is also applied to validate these results and the case of a dielectric filled waveguide is considered showing the improved ability to support left-handed modes. The authors present the results of a parametric study of how left-handed propagation depends on the corrugation depth. Potential applications of backward waves in corrugated circular waveguides are proposed.


Almonds provide a satiating, healthy source of fat and fiber. The postprandial metabolic and satiety response to 2 ounces of nuts or dairy was assessed in 18 overweight/obese women during late pregnancy. Serum glucose, triglycerides, insulin, c-peptide, leptin, ghrelin, and lipoprotein particles were measured prior to and during a 5-h postprandial period following the consumption of an isocaloric breakfast meal with equivalent amounts of fat from either nuts or dairy on two separate mornings. Satiety was assessed by visual analogue scale (VAS) questionnaires and ad libitum food intake at the end of the study. At 33 weeks gestation, the women had gained an average of 7.0 ± 4.4 kg during gestation. Body fat averaged 41.9 ± 5.5% and hemoglobin A1c levels were elevated, (7.2 ± 0.6%). Fasting glucose levels were normal, but hyperinsulinemia was evident. The two test meals did not affect the postprandial metabolic response, but glucose, triglyceride, and ghrelin concentrations changed with time during the postprandial period (p < 0.001, p = 0.0008, p = 0.006). Satiety measures did not differ between the two test meals. Consuming an isocaloric breakfast meal with equivalent amounts of fat from nuts or dairy did not alter postprandial levels of blood lipids, glucose, hormones, or measures of satiety in overweight/obese, pregnant women.


Although the function of somatodendritic GABAA receptors is augmented by propofol, it is not known whether presynaptic GABAA receptor function is similarly affected. In the present study, we examined the action of propofol on the second positive wave (P2 component) of segmental spinal cord evoked potentials (seg SCEPs), which is believed to reflect GABAA receptor-mediated presynaptic inhibition of primary afferent terminals and can be recorded from spinal epidural space in man. In all seven patients tested while undergoing scoliosis surgery, a clinical dose of propofol (1 mg//kg, i.v.) significantly augmented the P2 component of seg SCEPs evoked by ulner nerve stimulation. We conclude that propofol enhances GABAA receptor-mediated presynaptic inhibition at primary afferent terminals in human spinal cord.


The first objective of this study was to assess and optimize somatic embryo production in a genetically diverse range of cacao genotypes. The primary and secondary somatic embryogenesis response of eight promising cacao clones and a positive control was evaluated using modified versions of standard protocols. The second objective was to optimize the efficiency of primary somatic embryogenesis for a commercially important cacao clone, CCN 51, which has proven to be quite recalcitrant to standard protocols, relative to CCN 10, a clone also included in our analysis. The efficiency of the overall process was assessed by determining the number of somatic embryos produced per starting somatic tissue explant, as well as the quality of embryos (normal vs. abnormal) produced. Donor floral explants were subjected to five tissue culture steps, each 15-25 days in duration. Although all studied genotypes produced primary somatic embryos, most of them originated only from brown or brown-white callus. Overall, flower petals performed better than staminodes, and our best performing genotype yielded an average of 7-10 embryos produced in brown callus explants with embryogenic response during primary somatic embryogenesis procedures. In conclusions our analysis from a pilot in a small-scale are: 1) it is possible to achieve a high production of plants by somatic embryogenesis, although the efficiency is highly genotype-dependent; it is therefore necessary to optimize hormone balance and hormone type, as well as the explant type for each genotype, 2) through the use of secondary somatic embryogenesis, it is possible to increase somatic embryogenesis production at least ten-fold, and 3) the observed response variation between genotypes may reflect differences in endogenous and exogenously-supplied hormones. The importance of adapting the tissue culture protocol to the genotype is discussed.

 Key words: Somatic embryogenesis, 2,4-D, cellular competence, propagation, abnormalities, ethylene, cacao.


Microbubbles designate air or gas filled microspheres suspended in a liquid carrier phase which generally results from the introduction of air or gas. The liquid phase contains surfactants to control the surface properties as well as stability of the bubble. Microbubbles have an average size less than that of RBC's i.e. they are capable of penetrating even into the smallest blood capillaries & releasing drugs or genes, incorporated on their surface, under the action of ultrasound. Microbubbles in general have a wide variety of applications. However in the biomedical field these are primarily used as diagnostic agents in combination with ultrasound for molecular imaging of various organs and even tumors. These are also proposed for drug and gene delivery to targeted regions in combination with various ligands. Most of the physicians today prefer imaging with ultrasound in combination with microbubbles compared to other diagnostic techniques for low cost and rapidity.


Streptococcus iniae, the etiological agent of streptococcosis in fish, is an important pathogen of cultured and wild fish worldwide. During the last decade outbreaks of streptococcosis have occurred in a wide range of cultured and wild fish in the Americas and Caribbean islands. To gain a better understanding of the epizootiology of S. iniae in the western hemisphere, over 30 S. iniae isolates recovered from different fish species and geographic locations were characterized phenotypically and genetically. Species identities were determined biochemically and confirmed by amplification and sequencing of the 16S rRNA gene. Repetitive-element palindromic PCR fingerprinting as well as biochemical and antimicrobial susceptibility profiles suggest that a single strain of S. iniae was responsible for two different disease outbreaks among reef fishes in the Caribbean, one in 1999 and another in 2008. Interestingly, a majority of the isolates recovered from cultured fish in the Americas were genetically distinct from the Caribbean isolates and exhibited a trend toward higher minimal inhibitory concentration with respect to several antibiotics as well as greater genetic variability. The biological significance of this genetic variability is unclear, but it could have implications for future vaccine development and treatment.


In FMRT1] we introduced a cluster expansion for many Fermion systems in two space dimensions based on a so-called sector decomposition. In this paper a completely diierent expansion is introduced to treat the more diicult case of three (or more) space dimensions: it is based on an auxiliary scale decomposition and the use of the Hadamard inequality. We prove that the perturbative expansion for a single scale model has a convergence radius independent of the scale. This is a typical result, proved in the two dimensional case in FMRT1], which we cannot obtain in three dimensions by naive extrapolation of the sector method. Although we do not treat in this paper the full (multiscale) system, we hope this new method to be a signiicant step towards the rigorous construction of the BCS theory of superconductivity in three space dimensions.


Economic recessions increase costs, risk, stress, uncertainty, and business failures while decreasing the availability of employment. Individuals who seek to become self-employed in recessionary times, whether out of need or for opportunity reasons, face difficult and unique circumstances. We use cross-section repeated-measures rare events logistic regression to model the effects that living in rural America and changes in the economy have on the probability of individuals engaging in necessity or opportunity entrepreneurial activities both before the recession (2005–2007) and during the recession (2008–2010). Key findings indicate that before the recession, individuals living in rural metro and nonmetro counties were more likely to engage in opportunity-driven entrepreneurial activities when compared to individuals living in more urban counties. Positive employment growth rates before the recession also increased the probability that individuals in rural areas would engage in opportunity entrepreneurship. The recession marked a shift in the motivation of individuals in rural America to become self-employed. There is a clear decline in opportunity entrepreneurship and an increase in necessity entrepreneurship. In all rural and mixed-rural counties, college education positively predicts opportunity entrepreneurship, whereas individuals with incomes below $50,000 or working in a part-time job are more likely to engage in entrepreneurship driven by need.


ABSTRACT Although individuals with Asperger syndrome (AS) are often described to be semantic-pragmatic disordered, it is still unclear to what extent their semantic comprehension is impaired. The primary goal of this study is to understand the sentence comprehension of adults with AS by investigating their reading processes of sentences involving the conjunctive entailment of disjunction. More specifically, their on-line processes of reading globally ambiguous sentences containing huo 'or' in Mandarin Chinese, which can be understood as either a conjunction or a disjunction in simple negative statements, were recorded. The results indicated that both AS and typically developing groups tended to interpret the ambiguous huo as a conjunction. Additionally, both groups consistently spent significantly more time judging the appropriateness of disjunction-biased sentences. It is argued that, for adults with AS, at least some aspects of semantic knowledge are intact. Future studies are suggested to focus on different sentence types to further explore to what extent that semantics is impaired among individuals with AS.


This guide provides students with access to a variety of resources that are useful for researching topics in World Politics.


Abstract. HadISDH.2.0.0 is the first gridded, multi-variable humidity and temperature in situ observations-only climate-data product that is homogenised and annually updated. It provides physically consistent estimates for specific humidity, vapour pressure, relative humidity, dew point temperature, wet bulb temperature, dew point depression and temperature. It is a monthly mean gridded (5° by 5°) product with uncertainty estimates that account for spatio-temporal sampling, climatology calculation, homogenisation and irreducible random measurement effects. It provides a tool for the long-term monitoring of a variety of humidity-related variables which have different impacts and implications for society. It is also useful for climate model evaluation and reanalyses validation. HadISDH.2.0.0 is shown to be in good agreement both with other estimates and with theoretical understanding. The data set is available from 1973 to the present. The theme common to all variables is of a warming world with more water vapour present in the atmosphere. The largest increases in water vapour are found over the tropics and the Mediterranean. Over the tropics and high northern latitudes the surface air over land is becoming more saturated. However, despite increasing water vapour over the mid-latitudes and Mediterranean, the surface air over land is becoming less saturated. These observed features may be due to atmospheric circulation changes, land–sea warming disparities and reduced water availability or changed land surface properties.


Aim.  This paper reviews the theoretical and research-based literature related to the management of people with chronic confusion as a consequence of dementia in the acute care setting. Background.  People aged 65 years and over are at increased risk of poor outcomes when admitted to the acute care setting as a result of comorbity and mismanagement of their chronic confusion. The challenge of caring for people with dementia in acute care is one that requires special attention. Results.  The theoretical literature outlines a number of principles of care necessary for best practice in the care of people with dementia. A number of different models of care are reported in the literature and some evaluative research has been undertaken to assess the benefits of the different models. Conclusion.  There are a number of interventions that if put into place in acute care may improve care of people with dementia and reduce the burden of care. There is emerging evidence that interventions such as staff education, skilled expertise, standardized care protocols and environmental modification help to meet the needs of people with dementia in acute hospital settings. This paper adds to our current understanding of management of dementia in the acute care setting, an area that demonstrates the need to move from descriptive to intervention studies to ensure evidence for care of persons with a dementing condition.


More than two decades ago the Public Engagement with Science and Technology (PEST) paradigm gained influence in the field of science communication, marked by the publication of the third report of the House of Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology in the year 2000. The approach advocated in the report went beyond the traditional Public Understanding of Science (PUS) paradigm that had focused on sharing scientific knowledge with broader publics via top-down dissemination. It assigned citizens a more active and powerful role vis a vis science, emphasized the need for participatory discourses aiming at a shared understanding with non-scientific publics, and acknowledged both citizens' democratic rights regarding science-related decisions and their potential constructive contributions in the creation of socially relevant knowledge.


A rare congenital defect in fusion of the anterior chest wall resulting in an extrathoracic location of the heart. Cantrell's pentalogy is a congenital anomaly resulting from embryologic development defect and consists of the following: A deficiency of the anterior diaphragm, a midline supraumbilical abdominal wall defect, a defect in the diaphragmatic pericardium, congenital intracardiac abnormalities, and a defect of the lower sternum. Here we report a rare case of ectopic cordis with omphalocele.


Background: Alcohol septal ablation has emerged as a therapy for patients with obstructive hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM). However, there are limited data on the predictors of success with the procedure. Methods: We examined patient characteristics and cardiac morphology as well as procedural data on 166 HCM patients (mean age, 63 years; 43% men), who underwent ablation at Mayo Clinic. Patients were contacted to determine vital status and symptoms to assess the primary endpoint of survival free of death and severe symptoms (New York Heart Association, class III or IV dyspnea). Results: The strongest patient characteristics that predicted clinical success were older age, less severe left ventricular outflow tract gradient, lesser ventricular septal hypertrophy, and a smaller left anterior descending (LAD) diameter. Mitral valve geometry or ventricular septal morphology did not predict outcome. Patients with 3 characteristics (age 65 years, gradient <100 mmHg, septal hypertrophy 18 mm, LAD diameter <4.0 mm) had superior 4-year survival free of death and severe symptoms (90.4%) in comparison to those with two characteristics (81.6%) and 1 characteristic (57.5%). Case volume with >50 patients was an independent predictor of survival free of severe symptoms. The volume of alcohol injected, number of arteries injected, or size of septal perforator artery were not predictive of clinical success. Conclusions: Greater case volume and selection for key patient and anatomic characteristics are associated with superior outcomes with alcohol septal ablation. VC 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.


@font-face { font-family: Times New Roman ; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: Times New Roman ; }table.MsoNormalTable { font-size: 10pt; font-family: Times New Roman ; }span.msoIns { font-style: italic; color: teal; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; } From pauper's food to cultural icon, this book tells the story of our relationship with the lobster, from coastal hunter-gatherers through the Industrial Revolution to modern times. As lobsters became a status symbol for the rich, they became the subjects of both artists and writers. The lobster has been depicted in Egyptian temples and Pompeiian feasts; Dutch still lifes and Japanese woodcuts; Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Salvador Dali's Lobster Telephone. And the social history of its consumption takes us from the Stone Age, through the early European settlers in New England and Australia, to today's Japanese live lobster sashimi. The lobster has been transformed from a peasant food into a luxurious delicacy that reflects our changing ideas about diet and human consumption. Today's consumer is concerned about the ethics of eating lobster, and controversy rages about methods of killing them. Though scientists continue to debate whether lobsters can feel pain, concerns about cruelty have led to the invention of new machines that are intended to kill them humanely. There are also efforts to farm lobsters, to re-stock the seas with juveniles and to fish them sustainably. Lobster will appeal to anyone who loves this fascinating crustacean, or who has chased a lobster across a kitchen floor.


In cyclophosphamide (CP)-induced tolerance, a long lasting skin allograft tolerance was established in many H-2-identical strain combinations without graft vs host disease. Destruction of donor-reactive T cells of host origin, followed by intrathymic clonal deletion of these cells, has been revealed to be the chief mechanisms of this system. Here, we studied the fate of host-reactive populations in donor-derived T cells of C3H/He (C3H) (H-2k, Mls-1b, Mls-2a) mice rendered CP-induced tolerant to AKR/J (AKR) (H-2k, Mls-1a, Mls-2b), by assessing AKR-derived Thy-1.1+ T cells bearing TCR V beta 3 that are specifically reactive with Mls-2a-encoded Ag of the recipient C3H mice. In the AKR-derived Thy-1.1+ lymph node cells of the C3H mice that had been treated with AKR spleen cells plus CP, CD4(+)-V beta 3+ T cells were obviously decreased by day 10 after the CP treatment. At this stage, the Thy-1.1+ T cells were not detected in the C3H thymus, suggesting that the obvious decrease of CD4(+)-V beta 3+ T cells of AKR origin was not due to intrathymic clonal deletion in the recipient C3H mice. Therefore, the destruction of the host-reactive mature T cells of donor origin, as well as that of the donor-reactive mature T cells of host origin, occurred by the CP treatment at the induction phase. Furthermore, after the establishment of intrathymic mixed chimerism in the recipient C3H mice, V beta 3+ T cells were not detected among the Thy-1.1+ T cells of AKR origin in the mixed chimeric thymus, suggesting that the host-reactive immature T cells repopulated from the injected donor hematopoietic cells were clonally deleted in the recipient thymus. These two mechanisms appear to prevent graft vs host disease in CP-induced tolerance.


Background Currently available hand-held dynamometers (HHD) offer a more objective and reliable assessment of muscle force production as compared to a manual muscle test (MMT). Yet, their clinical utility is limited due to high cost. The ActivForce (AF) digital dynamometer is a new low-cost HHD with unknown psychometric properties, and its utilization may benefit clinical practice. Hypothesis/Purpose This study aimed to determine the AF intra- and inter-tester reliabilities, standard error of measurement (SEM), minimal detectable change (MDC), and criterion validity for assessing shoulder isometric force as compared to the microFET2 (MF2) across testers with different experiences. Design Descriptive observational study. Methods A convenience sample of 29 healthy adults were assessed twice by each of three testers (two experienced clinicians and a novice PT student) on shoulder external rotation (ER), internal rotation (IR), and forward elevation (FE) using both the AF and MF2 devices. Tester, HHD, and shoulder motion assignment orders were randomized. All testing was performed in a standardized seated position. ER and IR were tested with the shoulder fully adducted. FE was tested at 45° at the scapular plane. All testing and rest periods between testers and tested motions were standardized and monitored via a stopwatch. Results Both devices had high intra- [ ER (.95-.98), IR (.97 - .99), FE (.96 - .99)] and inter-tester [ ER (.85-.96), IR (.95 - .97), FE (.88 - .95)] intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) with comparable intra- (1.68-1.80) and inter-tester (2.36-2.98) SEM, and intra- (4.64-4.97) and inter-tester (6.50-8.24) MDC values across all motions. Tester experience did not affect these values. High (.89-.93) statistically significant Pearson correlations were found between HHDs for all shoulder motions. Conclusion Both the AF and MF2 HHDs were found to have high reliability levels across all shoulder motions regardless of tester clinical experience. The AF was also found to be valid for measuring shoulder isometric force production compared to the criterion standard device, the MF2. Its low-cost and electronic accessibility features may promote better compliance for clinicians using dynamometry to objectively assess and store muscle force data in a cost-effective manner. Level of Evidence 3


Multiple quorum‐sensing circuits function in parallel to control virulence and biofilm formation in Vibrio cholerae. In contrast to other bacterial pathogens that induce virulence factor production and/or biofilm formation at high cell density in the presence of quorum‐sensing autoinducers, V. cholerae represses these behaviours at high cell density. Consistent with this, we show here that V. cholerae strains 'locked' in the regulatory state mimicking low cell density are enhanced for biofilm production whereas mutants 'locked' in the regulatory state mimicking high cell density are incapable of producing biofilms. The quorum‐sensing cascade we have identified in V. cholerae regulates the transcription of genes involved in exopolysaccharide production (EPS), and variants that produce EPS and form biofilms arise at high frequency from non‐EPS, non‐biofilm producing strains. Our data show that spontaneous mutation of the transcriptional regulator hapR is responsible for this effect. Several toxigenic strains of V. cholerae possess a naturally occurring frameshift mutation in hapR. Thus, the distinct environments occupied by this aquatic pathogen presumably include niches where cell‐cell communication is crucial, as well as ones where loss of quorum sensing via hapR mutation confers a selective advantage. Bacterial biofilms could represent a complex habitat where such differentiation occurs.


Executive Summary Finite element modeling has been used extensively in designing automotive engines and subsystems for evaluating the sealing and NVH (noise/Vibration/harshness) performance. The elastomeric components exhibit the nonlinear stress-strain responses and frequency-dependent viscoelasticity, and often have contact interferences with mating components. Directly including detailed elastomeric components into the three-dimensional finite element models of the engines or subsystems has been impractical. Therefore, the elastomeric components at the interfaces are often omitted in the system finite element models because of the lack of computationally "effective" elements. The paper presents a methodology to model the elastomeric components for sealing and NVH applications using newly developed Viscoelastic gasket elements. The viscoelastie gasket element is a one-dimensional element with load and deflection defined in the thickness direction only. Thus it has great computational efficiency. In addition, this element has the ability to incorporate the frequency-dependent viscoelastic properties of the materials and thus can be used to analyze the NVH performance of the engines and subsystems. In the present study, an elastomer isolated engine cylinder-head cover assembly is used as an example. The finite element modeling includes two steps. First, detailed local finite element analyses are performed on elastomeric gaskets and grommets to capture their nonlinear load-deflection and contact interferences. Secondly, a global finite element model of the cover assembly is constructed where the gaskets and grommets are remodeled with one-dimensional, viscoelastie gasket elements. The forced response dynamic analysis is performed to compute the vibration at the cover surface. The results are consistent with the experimental measurements and with the work done earlier using viscoelastic shell elements.


Aims: COVID-19 patients with comorbidities such as hypertension or heart failure (HF) are associated with poor clinical outcomes. The cellular distribution of Angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2), the critical enzyme for SARS-CoV-2 infection, in the human heart is unknown. We explore the underlying mechanism that leads to increased susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2 in patients with cardiovascular diseases and patients of cardiac dysfunction have increased risk of multi-organ injury compared with patients of normal cardiac function. Methods and Results: We analyzed single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) data in both normal and failing hearts. The results demonstrated that ACE2 is present in cardiomyocytes (CMs) and non-CMs, while the number of ACE2-postive (ACE2+) CMs and ACE2 gene expression in these CMs are significantly increased in the failing hearts. Interestingly, both brain natriuretic peptides (BNP) and atrial natriuretic peptide (ANP) are significantly up-regulated in the ACE2+ CMs, which is consistent with other studies that ACE2, ANP, and BNP increased in HF patients. We found that genes related to virus entry, virus replication and suppression of interferon-gamma signaling are all up-regulated in failing CMs, and the increase was significantly higher in ACE2+ CMs, suggesting that these CMs may be more vulnerable to virus infection. As the level of expression of both ACE2 and BNP in CMs were up-regulated, we further performed retrospective analysis of the plasma BNP levels and clinical outcomes of 91 COVID-19 patients from a single-center. Patients with higher plasma BNP were associated with significantly higher mortality and expression levels of inflammatory and infective markers. Conclusion: In the failing heart, the upregulation of ACE2 and virus infection associated genes could potentially facilitate SARS-CoV-2 virus entry and replication in these vulnerable cardiomyocyte subsets. COVID-19 patients with higher plasma BNP levels had poorer clinical outcomes. These observations may allude to a potential regulatory association between ACE2 and BNP in mediating myocarditis associated with COVID-19.


Clark Butte, Hoback Basin, Greater Yellowstone Bioregion, Middle Rockies, Wyoming, USA, North America, Earth. These descriptors fix my location on Earth, my terra munde, a particular place that grounds my being but is not mine alone. Rising up out of United States Forest Service land, it is public domain, joining in common all species that live in or pass through its environs. The hike to its summit at 8000 feet elevation, about 1000 feet above the basin floor, is more than a cardio-vascular workout, although it surely is that. It is a review of the diverse vegetative communities from sagebrush steppe to spruce/fir forest: the red bloom of wild onion and delicate ivory sego lily cups of spring, the papery sheen of dry pods in autumn. Here I meet the "Others," prey and predators maintaining a delicate balance: dragonflies and mosquitoes, eagles and ground squirrels, coyotes and antelope. The latter are always in sight from birth to rut when they start their migration to winter in the Green River Basin. On the summit as I catch my breath, I enjoy the view and spend a moment in contemplation.


Considering the importance of explaining how a nation brand is effectively
managed and how nation branding aligns the nation's brand with country management
so as to gain competitiveness, this research aims to assess the role of nation branding
and to create a strategic management tool for nation branding to achieve sustainable
competitiveness of nations. Focusing on performance in nation branding, the
dissertation develops a brand management model towards a systematic and strategic
application for nation branding.
Adopting a deductive approach based on a five-step plan for systematic research,
the study proposes the Nation-Branding Mechanism Model as a mechanism-based
process model. To provide empirical evidence a case study methodology is
implemented involving two countries: the Republic of Korea and the Republic of
Ireland. Longitudinally, the research investigates contextual variables of the nation
branding process and their dynamics in branding Korea and Ireland by analyzing the
"Export, Science, Technology and Industry"-brand system of Korea and the "FDI,
Industry, Enterprise and Knowledge"- brand system of Ireland. The study identifies
the nation-specific branding mechanisms within their nation-brand systems and the
similarities and differences in both nation branding processes.
An important finding is that nation branding is a process that must align with
country management to influence the sustainable competitiveness of a nation and that
needs a systematic approach to building a nation brand. The mechanism-based
process structures a set of activities carried out by branding actors. Moreover, nation branding is an ongoing and iterative process to develop a nation-brand system and to
influence a nation's sustainable competitiveness.
This research suggests the 'Nation-Branding Mechanism Model' as an effective
model for explaining performance in nation branding. Through its development, this
study contributes to building a body of knowledge concerning the role of nation
branding as a strategic management tool for achieving sustainable competitiveness of
nations.


The most recent BIS triennial survey shows that turnover in foreign exchange markets increased by more than 70% over the three years to April 2007. Two specific findings stand out. First, the growth in transactions between banks and other financial institutions was particularly strong, consistent with the increasing importance of hedge funds, as well as portfolio diversification by institutional investors with a longer-term horizon, such as pension funds. Second, there has been a marked increase in turnover involving emerging market currencies.


A large gravel pit 30 km north of the Pomeranian ice margin has been investigated. Besides gravel, sand, fines and diamicton, several deposits of organic material are present, some of them showing a typical Eemian Pollen- and macroflora. Previous interpretations assume that the sediments below the Eemian peat belong to the Saalian, and those above the peat to the Weichselian. Sorted sediments in the central part of the pit are interpreted as Elsterian and Saalian glacifluvial channel fills. This study shows that all sediments in the pit belong to the last deglaciation and that none of the peat layers are in situ. Rafts of older sediments, including peat and older tills, have been dislocated during an ice advance and finally deposited in a dead-ice environment during the retreat of the last ice sheet. The dominating gravel and sand deposits in the central part of the pit are interpreted as an intermediate braided river system in the dead-ice landscape. Debris-rich dead-ice melted down and melt-out material as well as mass-movement deposits were deposited. Pollen assemblages from the different organic materials suggest both Eemian and Tertiary origin. All of them are re-deposited. Since Eemian and Tertiary peat are not in situ in this open section, organic material from drill holes in the vicinity may also be re-deposited and might not serve as stratigraphical marker horizons. Thus, stratigraphical marker horizons such as peat cannot be accepted unconditionally, but must be proved in their sedimentological, stratigraphical and structural context. (Less)


Using orthogonal-frequency-division-multiplexing (OFDM) format for passive optical network (PON) is a subject of great interest for recent research works. OFDM signal has high spectral efficiency, high tolerance to the fiber chromatic dispersion and the high flexibility on both multiple services provisioning and dynamic bandwidth allocation. In this paper we study the use of OFDM signals for optical access networks, including carrier distributed PON, heterogeneous optical wired/wireless network and a 100 Gb/s OFDM-PON. We first quantify the performance of the OFDM signal when subjected to the noise produced by two different Rayleigh backscattering (RB) components that are present in the carrier-distributed PON. Then, based on these results, we also study the possibility of using OFDM for signal remodulation in a long-reach (LR)-PON. We propose carrier-distributed OFDM PONs using a dual-feeder fiber architecture and wavelength-shifting to mitigate the RB noise. Afterwards, we propose heterogeneous optical wired/wireless access networks, combining 10 Gb/s PON and 10 Gb/s OFDM radio-over-fiber (ROF) network. Finally, we propose a 100 Gb/s OFDM-PON using subcarrier multiplexing (SCM).


Mating and lambing over a three-year period (1968 to 1970) were studied for a flock of 540 ewes grazing annual pasture at Werribee, Victoria. Rams were joined with ewes over a six-week period either in February-March or in April-May and the ewes were stocked at three rates (5, 75, and 10 ewes per hectare). The proportion of ewes that lambed and the number of lambs born per ewe were greater when ewes were joined in April-May than in February-March. For the later joining there was little effect of stocking rate on either the proportion of ewes lambing or the number of lambs born per ewe. However, when ewes were joined in February-March, both the proportion of ewes lambing and the number of lambs born per ewe were reduced with each increase in stocking rate. Failure of ewes to lamb was a problem among maiden ewes in 1968 and was more pronounced for the ewes joined early than for those joined later in the breeding season. Among ewes stocked at 5 per hectare the proportion returning to service was higher than among ewes stocked at 73 and 10 per hectare.


The need to be cross-culturally competent is increasing in today's society, where many nationalities live within the same geographical area. Each nationality may have different cultural or religious beliefs that affect how they accept care; providers must be aware of these beliefs in treating diverse children.


In a recent paper Chan et al. [SODA '19] proposed a relaxation of the notion of (full) memory obliviousness, which was introduced by Goldreich and Ostrovsky [J. ACM '96] and extensively researched by cryptographers. The new notion, differential obliviousness, requires that any two neighboring inputs exhibit similar memory access patterns, where the similarity requirement is that of differential privacy. Chan et al. demonstrated that differential obliviousness allows achieving improved efficiency for several algorithmic tasks, including sorting, merging of sorted lists, and range query data structures.
In this work, we continue the exploration and mapping of differential obliviousness, focusing on algorithms that do not necessarily examine all their input. This choice is motivated by the fact that the existence of logarithmic overhead ORAM protocols implies that differential obliviousness can yield at most a logarithmic improvement in efficiency for computations that need to examine all their input. In particular, we explore property testing, where we show that differential obliviousness yields an almost linear improvement in overhead in the dense graph model, and at most quadratic improvement in the bounded degree model. We also explore tasks where a non-oblivious algorithm would need to explore different portions of the input, where the latter would depend on the input itself, and where we show that such a behavior can be maintained under differential obliviousness, but not under full obliviousness. Our examples suggest that there would be benefits in further exploring which class of computational tasks are amenable to differential obliviousness.


OBJECTIVE
Insulin resistance has been strongly associated with cardiovascular risk. Recently, leptin, a hormone that regulates appetite, has been associated with both obesity and insulin resistance. However, the possible relation of leptin to the insulin resistance syndrome has been controversial.

RESEARCH METHODS AND PROCEDURES
To explore this issue, we examined the relation of leptin to blood pressure, lipid levels, low density lipoprotein (LDL) size, and glucose levels in 87 normoglycemic men.

RESULTS
Leptin levels were significantly correlated with body mass index (BMI) (r = 0.494), fasting insulin (r = 0.576), whole-body glucose disposal rate (GDR) (r = -0.566), fasting glucose (r = 0.510) total triglycerides (r = 0.294), apolipoprotein B (r = 0.223), systolic blood pressure (r = 0.223), and LDL size (r = -0.244). After adjustment for BMI and GDR, leptin levels remained significantly correlated with fasting insulin, fasting glucose, triglyceride, apolipoprotein B, and systolic blood pressure. Leptin levels were also correlated with the number of metabolic risk factors (dyslipidemia, systolic blood pressure, and fasting glucose).

DISCUSSION
We conclude that leptin concentrations may be associated with several cardiovascular risk factors related to insulin resistance syndrome. These associations are only partly explained by leptin's relationship with BMI and GDR.


This paper uses a unique data set with housing consumption, well-being measures and time use patterns to explore the implications of homeownership. After controlling for income, housing quality and health, female homeowners are not better off than renters by a variety of measures, both global and situational. Instead, they derive significantly more pain from their house and home – comparable to the unadjusted increase from a doubling in home value. Differences in financial security, health, self-esteem, perceived control, stress level cannot account for the well-being results. One potential mechanism is time use differences: female homeowners tend to spend less time on enjoyable activities, such as active leisure.


Mathematical description of biological processes, including cell growth, cell differentiation, cell response to stress, and cell damage and death, could be beneficial to the characterization, quantitative evaluation, design, and optimization of the relevant processes. Phenomenological modeling based on experiments would be a promising method for the abovementioned description, although modeling should ideally be based on the outcome of system biological studies. Mathematical models have been developed for characterizing cell damage and death by hyperthermic stress and hypertonic electrolyte solution stress in relation to the medical application of bioheat transfer [1,2].Copyright © 2012 by ASME


The challenge of environmental pollution and climate change have made countries to develop energy transition progress to move from non-renewable energy sources towards renewable ones. This paper seeks to consider energy transformation process and analyze its pattern in Iran by modeling through the ARDL bounding testing method over the period of 1993-2018. The empirical estimations depicted that in the long-run economic growth and inflation rate negatively impact on energy transformation of Iran, while increase in carbon dioxide emissions and appreciation of Iran's national currency accelerate the energy transition process in Iran. Regarding the short-run relationship, the major results represented an evidence of positive impact of exchange rate on Iran's energy transition process, while the other variables have negative coefficient. As a major concluding remark, for the case of Iran, the findings prove that the influential impacts of explanatory variables on energy transformation are stronger in long-run rather than in short-run. Therefore, the presence of efficient long-run energy planning is recommended.