Hereditary nonpolyposis colon cancer is a common hereditary disorder caused by the germ-line mutations of DNA mismatch repair (MMR) genes, especially h MLH1 and hMSH2. We report here the first identification of human compounds with a homozygous inactivation of a MMR gene. In a typical hereditary nonpolyposis colon cancer family, MMRdeficient children conceived from matings between heterozygotes for a hMLH1 deleterious mutation exhibited clinical features ofde novoneurofibromatosis type 1 and early onset of extracolonic cancers. This observation demonstrates that MMR deficiency is compatible with human development but may lead to mutations during embryogenesis. On the basis of clinical symptoms observed in MMR-deficient children, we speculate that the neurofibromatosis type 1 gene is a preferential target for such alterations.


Hot-compression and hot-tension experiments were conducted on a Gleeble-1500D thermal-mechanical simulator. The constitutive equation was presented by calculating the stress exponent, activation energy and Zemer-Hollomon parameter during the hot compression. Based on dynamic material model theories and Prasad instability criterion, the hot processing map was developed and the representative microstructure was observed. The total elongation and reduction in area were calculated by the hot tension. These results have shown that P92 steel should be manufactured at higher processing temperature and larger strain rate in practice.


Monitoring human motion has recently received great attention and can be used in many applications, such as human motion prediction. We present the collected data set from a body sensor network attached to the human body. The set of sensors consists of accelerometers measuring acceleration in three directions that are attached to the upper and lower back as well as the knees and ankles. In addition, pressures on the insoles are measured with four pressure sensors inside each shoe. Two types of motion are considered: walking backwards on a straight line and walking forwards on a figure-8 path. Finally, we study and present basic statistics of the data.


ABSTRACT Solid phase reaction synthesis of wollastonite-2M by a natural rock precursor as the source of amorphous silica and CaCO3 is reported. Chemical treatments were carried out on a diatomitic rock from Crotone (Calabria, Italy) in order to measure its reactive silica and CaCO3 contents. Four series of synthesis were performed at 1000°C at ambient pressure by mixing, at different stoichiometry, the diatomitic rock with a natural limestone as a source of additive CaCO3, and sodium carbonate (Na2CO3) as triggering agent. Wollastonite-2M was characterized by chemo-physical, crystallographical and morphological-microtextural analyses. All these characterizations, together with infrared and nuclear magnetic resonance (29Si) responses provide values comparable to literature data. Estimation of the amorphous phase in the synthesis powders was performed through quantitative phase analysis using the combined Rietveld and reference intensity ratio methods, resulting in a final product of 96.3% wollastonite-2M.


The satisfaction of patients with the care they receive from healthcare providers has become one of the most important approaches to the measurement of the quality of care in recent times as against the predominantly clinical and administrative approaches. This is because patients' satisfaction could serve as index for compliance and non-compliance with care regimen. The study was to determine helpless patients' satisfaction with quality of care received at tertiary hospitals in Enugu. A descriptive survey research design was used for the study. A total population of 105 helpless patients (those that need assistance with the activities of daily living) were studied. Tools for data collection were questionnaire and interview guide. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics. Results showed that helpless patients were satisfied with physical and psychological care but satisfaction with spiritual care was marginal. Nurses seemed to lack skills for meeting spiritual needs of the patients. Patients' satisfaction with nurses attitude was marginally positive. The study showed that there was need for improvement in the care nurses provide for helpless patients in the spiritual dimension. Opportunities for continuing education programme in spiritual care and in interpersonal relationship need to be addressed.


An influence of a surface finish of a Cu electrode on joint properties of a lead-free solder joint with Sn-3mass%Ag-0.5mass%Cu has been investigated. As the surface treatment method, Ni/Au electroplating, Au electroplating and organic solderability preservative (OSP) treatments were conducted to Cu electrodes. A heat exposure treatment was conducted at 150°C up to 500h in order to investigate the reliability of the solder joint under heat exposure conditions. Ball shear test was performed to examine joint strength. Microstructural observation was conducted to investigate growth kinetics of a reaction layer formed at a joint interface and microstructural revolution in the solder layer.


Millimeter wave signals and large antenna arrays are considered enabling technologies for future 5G networks. Despite their benefits for achieving high data rate communications, their potential advantages for tracking of the location and rotation angle of the user terminals are not well investigated. A joint heuristic beam selection and user position and orientation tracking approach is proposed. First, the user location is tracked in the uplink by joint beam selection together with time-of-arrival (TOA) and angle-of-arrival (AOA) tracking at the base station (BS). Then, the user rotation angle is obtained using the location information by joint beam selection and tracking at the mobile station (MS). The beam selection, TOA and AOA tracking, at the BS and MS are performed during the data transmission phase. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed method performs close to the estimated position and rotation angle in the training phase with reduced complexity and reduced number of required pilots for the estimation.


Wavelet neural networks (WNN) combine the functions of time–frequency localization from the wavelet transform and of self-studying from the neural network, which make them particularly suitable for the classification of complex patterns. Based on auto-regressive (AR) model and WNN, pattern recognition of prothesis movements was studied in this paper. Firstly, an AR model was used to analysis the surface myoelectric signals (SMES) which recorded on the ulnar flexor carpi and extensor carpi region of the right hand in resting position. Four types of prosthesis movements are recognized by extracting four-order AR coefficient and construct them as eigenvector into WNN, which was used to study the correlation between SMES and wristwork. This paper compares the classification accuracy of four movements such as hand open (HO), hand close (HC), forearm intorsion (FI) and forearm extorsion (FE).The experimental results show that the proposed method can classify correctly for at least 93.75% of the test data.


METHODS
We have previously shown, that longterm pH-monitoring is of high clinical value for the diagnosis of gastro-oesophageal reflux disease. With this method, we were able to define a sample of 166 patients with proven reflux disease. All patients had typical reflux symptoms (heartburn and/or acid regurgitation) and pathologic pH-monitoring (diurnal reflux time > 8.2% and/or nocturnal reflux time > 3.0%). They were followed up by questionnaire and interview for a mean of 41 (range: 7-86) months after diagnosis of reflux disease.

RESULTS
Ten patients died of causes unrelated to reflux. In 117 (75%) of the remaining 156 patients data on the further course of the disease could be obtained. Twelve patients underwent anti-reflux surgery. Forty-one (39%) of the remaining 105 patients stopped taking medication, 13 of whom had no longer any symptoms. Sixty-four (61%) patients continued to use medication (40 as needed, 24 regularly). In comparison with baseline, symptoms were either unchanged or worse without medication in 71 patients, and better in 21. Patients with persisting symptoms during follow-up had significantly more nocturnal reflux initially (p < 0.05). The parameters oesophageal erosions at initial endoscopy, duration of reflux, age, sex, and smoking habits had no predictive value for the course of the disease. In conclusion, reflux symptoms appear to clear up spontaneously only in a minority of patients. More than half of all patients continue to use medication either as needed or regularly, with quite good results. Severe nocturnal reflux is an unfavorable prognostic factor.


Background: Although current antiretroviral therapies have effectively changed the course of HIV-1 infection, it remains an incurable illness. The C-C chemokine receptor type 5 (CCR5) is the key co-receptor for HIV entry into CD4+ T cells. Homozygous 32 deletion (delta32) in CCR5 genes leads to resistance to HIV-1 infection 1. Allogeneic stem cell transplant from a donor with CCR5 delta32/32 mutation was curative for HIV in an HIV-1-infected man (Berlin Patient) with AML 2. It has been challenging to replicate this experience. We present our experience with a single case of successful engraftment of CD34-selected, related haploidentical peripheral blood and CCR5delta32 cord blood stem cell transplant (haplo-cord) in an HIV-1-infected woman who, like the Berlin patient, developed AML and is now doing well at almost one-year post transplantation.
 Clinical case: A 60-year-old African-American woman was diagnosed with HIV-1- infection in June 2013 and was started on an antiretroviral treatment (ART) regimen consisting of tenofovir, emtricitabine and raltegravir. Her pre-ART viral load and CD4 counts were 1,000,000 copies/ml and 1003 cells/mm3, respectively. In Nov, 2013 she had viral load < 20 copies/ml with CD4 counts of 980 cells/mm3 and her HIV-1 infection was relatively asymptomatic. In March 2017, she was diagnosed with AML with monosomy 7. Her HIV therapy after the AML diagnosis was changed to abacavir- lamivudine -dolutegravir- combination. She achieved morphologic and cytogenetic remission after 1 cycle of standard idarubicin/cytarabine induction chemotherapy. In addition, she received 1 cycle of HiDAC consolidation and was referred for allogeneic stem cell transplant. We identified a CCR5 delta32/32 mutated cord blood unit (CBU) which was 5/8 HLA matched and contained 1.3 x 107 nucleated cells/kg and 3.2 x 104 CD34+ cells/kg.
 She underwent a combined CD34-selected, haploidentical peripheral blood and CCR5delta32 cord blood stem cell transplant (haplo-cord) in August 2017. Her conditioning regimen was with fludarabine/melphalan/and TBI400 and she also received ATG/MMF/tacrolimus for GVHD prophylaxis. Her neutrophils and platelets engrafted on day 10 and 16, respectively and she was discharged on day +16 post-transplant. Her post-discharge hospital course was complicated by CMV reactivation (no organ involvement) 2 months post-transplant with peak viral level of 1374 copies/ml. She did not have evidence for EBV re-activation or graft-vs-host disease. Her plasma HIV viral load remained undetectable post- transplant while remaining on abacavir/lamivudine and dolutegravir-based ART.
 Her day+180 bone marrow showed continued AML remission and she remains in clinical remission near one year post-transplant. CD3 chimerism showed 82% haploidentical donor and 8% CBU and 10% recipient on day +15 post-transplant (Figure 1). The chimerism composition switched to 96% CBU by day+34, and became and remained 100% CBU since day+55. CD33 chimerism showed 98% haploidentical donor and 2% cord donor on day+15 post-transplant. It was 81% haploidentical donor and 19% cord on day+55 and became 100% cord by day+100. She has continued CD4, CD8, NK and CD19 cell recovery, with normal T cell subsets currently (Figure 2). Her CD4 count dropped to 27 cells/mm3 at one-month post-transplant and currently is at 673cells/mm3. She is currently 11 months post-transplant and is back to her normal daily activities
 Conclusion: Haplo-cord transplantation with CCR5 delta 32/32 CBU resulted in rapid engraftment and immune replacement with dominance of the CCR5 delta 32/32 CBU graft in an HIV-1-infected woman. Successful suppression of HIV-1-replication to clinically undetectable levels was maintained throughout the transplant period for up to one year. . Correlative viral and immunological studies are ongoing, along with effects on the latent reservoir, which was detectable pre-transplant. It is possible to identify appropriate CCR5 delta 32/32 CBU units for haplo-cord transplantation in HIV-1- infected patients with implications for HIV-1 cure.
 Figure. Figure.

 No relevant conflicts of interest to declare.


We develop a transformer-based sequence-to-sequence model that recovers scalar ordinary differential equations (ODEs) in symbolic form from irregularly sampled and noisy observations of a single solution trajectory. We demonstrate in extensive empirical evaluations that our model performs better or on par with existing methods in terms of accurate recovery across various settings. Moreover, our method is efficiently scalable: after one-time pretraining on a large set of ODEs, we can infer the governing law of a new observed solution in a few forward passes of the model.


The paper examines the formation of evolutionary advanced causal factors set in modern conditions which may cause new pathological condition (state), being implemented through evolutionary fixed and standard pathological processes. The analysis of the notion of "metabolic syndrome" and its components has been performed. The correlation between insulin resistance, chronic inflammation, arterial hypertension, endothelial dysfunction and dyslipidemia has been indicated as the manifestations of one pathologic process, the central molecular basis of which is the activation of NF-kB. At the current stage it has been suggested to set up the conception of NF-kB permanent (long-lasting, low grade) activation as a possible model of pathological process.

https://fz.kiev.ua/journals/2012_V.58/Fiziologichnyi Zhurnal 58(1)_2012/Fiziologichnyi Zhurnal 58(1)__2012_93-101.pdf


Aggressive behavior (or violence) among juvenile offenders is a major social problem in the United States. Emotion Regulation (ER) is a critical developmental task that cuts across adolescence. However, there is paucity of research directly linking deficits in ER to aggressive behavior among juvenile offenders. Furthermore, researchers have failed to examine how the effect of ER on aggressive behavior is influenced by the adolescents' immediate environment, particularly by caregiving.

Acknowledging this gap in the current literature this study represents the first attempt to examine caregiving as a moderator in the relationship between ER and self-report of aggressive offending behavior among ethnically diverse juvenile offenders. Specifically, this study examined two caregiving dimensions (caregiver-adolescent affective relationships and monitoring) that affect development of ER and aggressive behavior from two theoretical perspectives: ecological-transactional model and attachment theory. Applying an ecological-transactional perspective, aggressive behavior was conceptualized as a byproduct of the mutual interaction between adolescent ontogenic development (ER) and the microsystem (caregiving). Attachment theory was integrated with the ecological-transactional model so as to delineate the underlying psychological mechanism regarding the dynamic interactions between ER and caregiving.

The present study used a longitudinal design analyzing the Pathways to Desistance study (n=892; 84% males; 21% White). The findings of the study suggest that changes in ER may cause—and do not merely predict—decline in juvenile offenders' aggressive behavior. The interaction effect was small in magnitude; however, monitoring operated as a significant moderator in the relationship between changes in ER and changes in aggressive behavior. The results imply that the increased ability to regulate emotion is a strong protective factor against aggressive behavior. Furthermore, effective caregiver's monitoring may promote positive development of cognitive ER. These relationships may operate synergetically, and may significantly contribute to decreases in aggressive behavior among juvenile offenders. The findings of this study hold strong implications for social work practitioners to treat juvenile offenders and their families. In an effort to reduce and prevent the perpetration of aggressive and violent behavior, social work practitioners in juvenile justice settings need to strengthen intervention efforts to improve ER skills and the quality of caregiving.


Demand of all living organisms on the same nutrients forms the basis for interspecific competition between plants and microorganisms in soils. This competition is especially strong in the rhizosphere. To evaluate competitive and mutualistic interactions between plants and microorganisms and to analyse ecological consequences of these interactions, we analysed 424 data pairs from 41 (15)N-labelling studies that investigated (15)N redistribution between roots and microorganisms. Calculated Michaelis-Menten kinetics based on K(m) (Michaelis constant) and V(max) (maximum uptake capacity) values from 77 studies on the uptake of nitrate, ammonia, and amino acids by roots and microorganisms clearly showed that, shortly after nitrogen (N) mobilization from soil organic matter and litter, microorganisms take up most N. Lower K(m) values of microorganisms suggest that they are especially efficient at low N concentrations, but can also acquire more N at higher N concentrations (V(max)) compared with roots. Because of the unidirectional flow of nutrients from soil to roots, plants are the winners for N acquisition in the long run. Therefore, despite strong competition between roots and microorganisms for N, a temporal niche differentiation reflecting their generation times leads to mutualistic relationships in the rhizosphere. This temporal niche differentiation is highly relevant ecologically because it: protects ecosystems from N losses by leaching during periods of slow or no root uptake; continuously provides roots with available N according to plant demand; and contributes to the evolutionary development of mutualistic interactions between roots and microorganisms.


Abstract Laboratory selection with Cry1Ac, the Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) toxin in transgenic cotton, initially produced 300-fold resistance in a field-derived strain of pink bollworm, Pectinophora gossypiella (Saunders), a major cotton pest. After additional selection increased resistance to 3,100-fold, we tested the offspring of various crosses to determine the mode of inheritance of resistance to Cry1Ac. The progeny of reciprocal F1 crosses (resistant male × susceptible female and vice versa) responded alike in bioassays, indicating autosomal inheritance. Consistent with earlier findings, resistance was recessive at a high concentration of Cry1Ac. However, the dominance of resistance increased as the concentration of Cry1Ac decreased. Analysis of survival and growth of progeny from backcrosses (F1 × resistant strain) suggest that resistance was controlled primarily by one or a few major loci. The progression of resistance from 300- to 3,100-fold rules out the simplest model with one locus and two alleles. Overall the patterns observed can be explained by either a single resistance gene with three or more alleles or by more than one resistance gene. The pink bollworm resistance to Cry1Ac described here fits "mode 1" resistance, the most common type of resistance to Cry1A toxins in Lepidoptera.


The sphere optimization program sphopt was originally written as a sequential program using LAPACK, and was converted to use ScaLAPACK, primarily to overcome memory limitations. The conversion was relatively straightforward, using a small number of organizing principles which are widely applicable to the ScaLAPACK parallelization of serial code. The main innovation is the use of a compressed block cyclic storage scheme to store two symmetric matrices in little more than the storage needed for one matrix. The resulting sphopt program scales at least as well as the ScaLAPACK Cholesky decomposition routine which it uses.

 References E. Anderson, Z. Bai, C. Bischof, L. S. Blackford, J. Demmel, J. E. Dongarra, J. D. Croz, A. Greenbaum, S. Hammarling, A. McKenney, and D. Sorensen. LAPACK Users' Guide (third ed.) . SIAM, Philadelphia, 1999. http://www.netlib.org/lapack/lug/ G. E. Andrews, R. Askey, and R. Roy. Special Functions , volume 71 of Encyclopedia of Mathematics and its Applications . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000. L. S. Blackford, J. Choi, A. Cleary, E. D'Azevedo, J. Demmel, I. Dhillon, J. Dongarra, S. Hammarling, G. Henry, A. Petitet, K. Stanley, D. Walker, and R. C. Whaley. ScaLAPACK Users' Guide . SIAM, Philadelphia, 1997. http://www.netlib.org/scalapack/slug/ J. Choi, J. J. Dongarra, L. S. Ostrouchov, A. P. Petitet, D. W. Walker, and R. C. Whaley. The design and implementation of the ScaLAPACK LU, QR, and Cholesky factorization routines. Technical Report 80, LAPACK Working Note, Knoxville, September 1994. http://www.netlib.org/lapack/lawnspdf/lawn80.pdf J. Choi, J. J. Dongarra, R. Pozo, and D. W. Walker. ScaLAPACK: A scalable linear algebra for distributed memory concurrent computers. Technical Report 55, LAPACK Working Note, Knoxville, November 1992. http://www.netlib.org/lapack/lawnspdf/lawn55.pdf E. F. D'Azevedo and J. J. Dongarra. Packed storage extensions for ScaLAPACK. Technical Report 135, LAPACK Working Note, Knoxville, April 1998. http://www.netlib.org/lapack/lawnspdf/lawn135.pdf J. J. Dongarra, R. A. Vandegeijn, and D. W. Walker. Scalability issues affecting the design of a dense linear algebra library, Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing 22 (3):523--537, September 1994. doi:10.1006/jpdc.1994.1108 J. J. Dongarra and R. C. Whaley. A user's guide to the BLACS v1.1. Technical Report 94, LAPACK Working Note, Knoxville, May 1997. originally released March 1995. http://www.netlib.org/lapack/lawnspdf/lawn94.pdf P. Leopardi. Converting a sphere optimization program from LAPACK to ScaLAPACK, 2004. http://wwwmaths.anu.edu.au/ leopardi/conversion-LAPACK-ScaLAPACK.pdf D. C. Liu and J. Nocedal. On the limited memory BFGS method for large scale optimization. Math. Programming , 45(3, (Ser. B)):503--528, 1989. doi:10.1007/BF01589116 M. Reimer. Multivariate Polynomial Approximation , volume 144 of International Series of Numerical Mathematics . {Birkhauser} Verlag, Basel, 2003. I. H. Sloan and R. S. Womersley. Extremal systems of points and numerical integration on the sphere. Advances in Computational Mathematics , 21:107--125, 2004. doi:10.1023/B:ACOM.0000016428.25905.da D. W. Walker and J. J. Dongarra. MPI: a standard Message Passing Interface. Supercomputer , 12(1):56--68, 1996. http://users.cs.cf.ac.uk/David.W.Walker/MPI/supercomputer96.html C. Zhu, R. H. Byrd, P. Lu, and J. Nocedal. Algorithm 778 L-BFGS-B: Fortran subroutines for large-scale bound constrained optimization. ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software (TOMS) , 23 (4): 550--560, December 1997. doi:10.1145/279232.279236


Medical images are visualized by computer and processed to obtain larger, more organized, and three-dimensional (3D) images. Thus, significant images are provided. The processed data facilitate diagnosis and treatment in the medical fields. The 3D surface models of related areas are formed by using volumetric data obtained by employing medical imaging methods such as Magnetic Resonance (MR) and Computer Tomography (CT). The purpose of this study is to obtain 3D images from the two-dimensional CT slices. These slices are obtained from the existing medical imaging devices and transferred to the z space and a mesh structure is provided between them. In addition, we investigated 3D imaging techniques, visualization, basic data types, conversion into main graphical components, and imaging algorithms. At the phase of obtaining 3D images; the image processing methods such as surface and volume imaging techniques, smoothing, denoising, and segmentation were used. The complexity and efficiency properties of the imaging algorithms were investigated and image enhancement algorithms were utilized.


Crude prices are subject to both demand and supply shocks. Major events and structural changes can induce large variations in intensities of the two types of shocks, as well as their magnitudes of impacts on crude price movements. This paper proposes a theoretical framework that allows us to extract the time variation in demand and supply shocks through a joint analysis of crude futures options and stock index options. Historical analysis shows that crude futures price movements are dominated by supply shocks in the earlier half of our sample from 2004 to 2008, but have become much more demand-driven since then. The large demand shock from the Great Recession, triggered by the 2008 financial crisis, contributes to the start of the dynamics shift. The shale revolution, on the other hand, has fundamentally altered the crude supply behavior. Since 2010, technology advances in horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, together with other innovations, have enabled rapid increase of U.S. tight oil production from shale at increasingly competitive cost. The increasing tight oil production has undercut the price-setting power of the OPEC, and has lowered the OPEC's incentive to self-regulate its production. As a result of the dynamics shift, investors have also been shifting from worrying about crude price hikes as a production cost gauge to crude price drops as an indication of weakening demand. The shifting dynamics have fundamental implications for optimal fuel cost hedging by heavy crude users such as the airline industry.


This study was conducted to investigate the effect of type and ratio of vermicompost on tomato growth, with five different types of vermicompost (platanus leaves, maple leaves, pruning apple trees and grape, waste of herbal extracts and azolla residues) and four ratios of vermicompost to peat and perlite (2:1 v/v) as 0, 1:3, 2:3 and 3:3, at greenhouse conditions. Results showed that type of vermicompost had a significant effect (P≤ 0.05) on plant height, shoot dry weight, root dry weight, number of internodes and stem diameter. The interaction between type and ratio of vermicompost had significant effect on root and shoot dry weight, stem diameter, nitrogen (N) percent, and potassium (K) percent. The highest effect on shoot dry weight, stem diameter and the N percentage was observed in the ratio of 2:3 vermicompost of azolla residues. The amount of K in the ratio of 2:3 vermicompost of maple leaves increased 66.18% as compared to the control treatment. Also, different ratios of vermicompost increased percentage of phosphorus and concentration of iron and zinc, as compared to peat+ perlite treatment. Generally, different types and ratios of vermicompost compared to peat+ perlite medium had a positive effect on growth indices and mineral concentration in the tomato plant.


Concept drift, which refers to non stationary learning problems over time, has increasing importance in machine learning and data mining. Many concept drift applications require fast response, which means an algorithm must always be (re)trained with the latest available data. But the process of data labeling is usually expensive and/or time consuming when compared to acquisition of unlabeled data, thus usually only a small fraction of the incoming data may be effectively labeled. Semi-supervised learning methods may help in this scenario, as they use both labeled and unlabeled data in the training process. However, most of them are based on assumptions that the data is static. Therefore, semi-supervised learning with concept drifts is still an open challenging task in machine learning. Recently, a particle competition and cooperation approach has been developed to realize graph-based semi-supervised learning from static data. We have extend that approach to handle data streams and concept drift. The result is a passive algorithm which uses a single classifier approach, naturally adapted to concept changes without any explicit drift detection mechanism. It has built-in mechanisms that provide a natural way of learning from new data, gradually "forgetting" older knowledge as older data items are no longer useful for the classification of newer data items. The proposed algorithm is applied to the KDD Cup 1999 Data of network intrusion, showing its effectiveness.


We report results of our prospective study - administration of Nebilet in 30 patients in perioperative period. Aim of this study is to estimate the protective effect of Nebilet for perioperative cardiac complications (nonfatal myocardial infarction and cardiac death) in patients which underwent recostructive vascular surgery. Patients were administrated Nebilet (2.5 to 7.5 mg/per day, according to arterial pressure and heart rates) 20 days before operation and 2 months after surgery. In early postoperative period we performed the control examinations: troponin T (1, 3, 7 days), ECG (1 day), echocardiography (1-2 day) and 2 months after operation (ECG and echocardiography). During whole follow up period we controlled in patients arterial pressure and heart rates.


The dynamic motion of tethered undersea kites (TUSK) is studied using numerical simulations. TUSK systems consist of a rigid-winged kite moving in an ocean current. The kite is connected by tethers to a platform on the ocean surface or anchored to the seabed. Hydrodynamic forces generated by the kite are transmitted through the tethers to a generator on the platform to produce electricity. TUSK systems are being considered as an alternative to marine turbines since the kite can move in high speed motions to increase power production compared to conventional marine turbines. The two-dimensional Navier-Stokes equations are solved on a regular structured grid that comprises the ocean current flow, and an immersed boundary method is used for the rigid kite. A two-step projection method along with Open Multi-Processing (OpenMP) is employed to solve the flow equations. The reel-out and reel-in velocities of the two tethers are adjusted to control the kite angle of attack and the resultant hydrodynamic forces. A baseline simulation was studied where a high net power output was achieved during successive kite power and retraction phases. System power output, vorticity flow fields, tether tensions, and hydrodynamic coefficients for the kite are determined. The power output results are in good agreement with established theoretical results for a kite moving in two dimensions.Copyright © 2015 by ASME


Effects of positioning on certain physiologic parameters were done in 7 term-pregnant bitches during general anesthesia. Five positions (right and left lateral recumbency, right and left 10 degrees to 15 degrees tilt toward lateral recumbency, and dorsal recumbency) were examined. Anesthesia was induced with thiamylal sodium and was maintained with halothane and nitrous oxide in oxygen. Direct arterial blood pressure, arterial blood gases, pH, base excess, heart rate, respiratory rate, and a lead II ECG were recorded from the bitches during each position. Effects of positioning for each bitch during general anesthesia were reexamined after the bitch weaned its pups; therefore, each bitch served as its own control. Maternal posture had no significant (P less than 0.05) effect on any measured parameters in bitches before or after parturition. Pregnancy had a significant (P less than 0.05) effect on every parameter, except heart rate. Pregnant bitches had a lower systolic blood pressure, lower Pao2, lower PCV, higher PaCO2, higher respiratory rate, and a more severe acidosis than did the bitches after parturition. Seemingly, supine hypotension did not occur in anesthetized term pregnant bitches (9 to 16 kg). Tilting the bitch 10 degrees to 15 degrees toward right or left lateral recumbency or true lateral recumbency was not preferable to dorsal recumbency for doing cesarean sections using general anesthesia.


Build your own web app with Bootstrap and AngularJS, utilizing the latest web technologies About This BookBuild, develop, and customize your application using Angular.js and BootstrapUtilize AngularStrap to pull in Bootstrap's jQuery plugins through Angular directivesPacked with tips to help you avoid potential stumbling blocks while developingWho This Book Is ForWhether you know a little about Bootstrap or AngularJS, or you're a complete beginner, this book will enhance your capabilities in both frameworks and you'll build a fully functional web app. A working knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript is required to fully get to grips with Bootstrap and AngularJS.What You Will Learn Explore Angular's built-in filters and create your own Create a multi-view web app using AngularJS's router and templating system Integrate AngularStrap to utilize the many plugins originally created by the Bootstrap team Customize Bootstrap using Less to create a unique theme Maintain the codebase of your app using the gulp and Grunt.js task-runner tools Discover the meaning of CRUD and how to implement it Troubleshoot any issues you may encounter while developing In DetailIf you're ready to progress your web development skills past HTML and CSS, this book will give you everything you need to build your own web app. You'll be taught the basics of Bootstrap and AngularJS, taking an in-depth look at what makes up each framework. After you've mastered the ideology, you'll put it into action as you build a contact manager throughout the course of the book.We'll look at filters, routing, and views for your app and will teach you to utilize CRUD (Create, Read, Update, and Delete) to develop further. You'll learn how to connect your app to the server, customize Bootstrap, and build a directive. Along the way we'll touch on additional technologies such as Less, gulp, Grunt, and AngularStrap. Finally, we'll take a look at potential stumbling blocks and will give you tips to avoid them.With this step-by-step guide packed with plenty of screenshots, you'll be building web apps in no time.


Many streams have been modified so extensively that river managers do not have clear reference conditions to frame targets for stream restoration. Large woody debris (LWD) has long been recognized as an important influence on both geomorphic and ecologic processes in stream channels; however, there have been few studies of LWD dynamics in New England. Although this region is heavily forested today, the forest is predominantly young (70–90 years old) regrowth following a historical episode of severe deforestation. This study presents the results of an extensive census of LWD and associated stream characteristics in over 16 river kilometres of northeastern Connecticut streams and represents the first reported inventory of wood loading and sorting in Southern New England. Results of this study indicate that wood loading and jam frequencies in the study region are low: 2.5–17.8 and 0.5–5.51 per 100 m, respectively. Orientation of LWD is predominantly parallel to flow, an indication that these streams are not retaining organic matter or sediment, which has important geomorphic and ecologic implications. Results imply that stream recruitment of LWD is still lagging from the massive forest conversions of the 18th and 19th centuries. Given the low wood loadings observed in the study reaches, manual wood addition and continued forest regeneration would likely improve both habitat diversity and organic matter and fine sediment retention in these systems. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.


Herein, a simple label-free biosensor fabrication method is demonstrated based on transmission localized surface plasmon resonance (T-LSPR). The platform, which consists of a silver nanoparticle array, can be prepared in just a few minutes using benchtop chemistry. The array was made by a templating technique in conjunction with the photoreduction of Ag ions from solution. This metal surface was functionalized with biotin-linked thiol ligands for binding streptavidin molecules from solution. For an array of 19 nm diameter silver nanoparticles, a redshift in the T-LSPR spectrum of 24 nm was observed upon protein-ligand binding at saturation. The binding constant was found to be 2 × 1012 M−1. Platforms were also fabricated with silver nanoparticles of 34, 55, and 72 nm diameters. The maximum LSPR wavelength shift was nanoparticle size dependent and the maximum sensitivity was obtained with the smaller nanoparticles.


We ask whether the birthplaces of Italian members of Parliament are favoured in the allocation of central government transfers. Using a panel of municipalities for the years between 1994 and 2006, we find that municipal governments of legislators' birth towns receive larger transfers per capita. Exploiting variation in birthplaces induced by parliamentary turnover for estimation, we find that this effect is driven by legislators who were born in a town outside their district of election. As a result, we argue that our findings cannot be a consequence of re-election incentives, the usual motivation for pork-barrel policies in the literature. Rather, politicians may be pursuing other personal motives. In line with this hypothesis, we find that the birth town bias essentially disappears when legislative elections are near. We explore several possible mechanisms behind our results by matching parliamentarians to a detailed dataset on local level administrators.


The rapid and all-encompassing changes in regional and world wine markets have stimulated us to carry out this study. Accordingly, based on the competitiveness of an important Port wine producer in Portugal, this article analyzes a strategic alliance between this company and another important multinational one that is present in many different worldwide distribution markets. Basically, the article seeks to understand, on the one side, the impact of a strategic alliance on a small Port wine producer when becoming involved with a multinational company, and, on the other hand, to identify differences, before and after the alliance, to the markets where the small company was made present. This work is centered on a case study and involves the use of econometrics methodologies that analyze panel data, in order to grasp differences of strategic pre- and post-alliance actions.  The conclusions are important, since they allow one to compare, on one hand, difference between the company´s performance over two different time horizons. On the other hand, econometrics methods are robust, since they allow one to come to relational conclusions, keeping the case study in mind.


We address digital transmission for enhancing, in a backward compatible way, the quality of analog image transmission systems. We propose a practical algorithm that treats the problem as one of wavelet image compression with side information (available in the form of a noisy analog version of the image) present at the decoder. We propose a rate allocation technique to efficiently allocate the rate among the wavelet coefficients of the image. In typical instances of the problem, we get gain up to 2.5 dB over conventional methods that ignore the side information. Surprisingly, this is typically achieved by modifying a very small fraction of the wavelet coefficients (typically around 10-20%) of the conventional source coder. Extensions of our proposed image transmission framework to that of video transmission finds application in the upgrade of current analog television broadcast systems to digital TV.


In ensembles of oscillators, intrinsic fluctuations often enable nontrivial dynamics in seemingly simple situations. One of such effects occurs in coupled FitzHugh–Nagumo oscillators subjected to external noise. At the considered parameter values, the global deterministic attractor is the resting state. Additive noise invokes transient bursting: series of intermittent patches of spikes, followed by the abrupt decay to rest. Duration of this transient, small for weak noise, asymptotically diverges when the noise becomes stronger. Remarkably, in repeated trials at fixed parameters, the number of bursts until the ultimate decay strongly varies. Lifetime statistics for this transient in large ensembles of numerical realizations features the exponential distribution. Observations on transient bursting are confirmed by experiments with coupled analog electronic circuits, modeling the FitzHugh–Nagumo dynamics. We relate the exponential character of the distribution to the probability that the system, disturbed by noise, escapes the local attraction basin of the resting state.


This paper investigated the wicking and drying behaviour of polyester woven fabrics. The effects of yarn type, weft density, weave structure, thickness and air permeability were evaluated by the application of vertical wicking, transfer wicking and drying tests. Correlation analysis and two sided independent t-tests of the data obtained from experiments and the evaluations reveal that the texturizing process - the alteration of the arrangement and packing of yarns by changing the weft density and weave type, are influential with respect to the wicking performance. Moreover the drying behaviour is influenced by the thickness of the fabric, air permeability and yarn type used in the fabric.


Prognostic markers of primary progressive multiple sclerosis evolution are needed. We investigated the added value of magnetic resonance imaging measures of brain and cervical cord damage in predicting long-term clinical worsening of primary progressive multiple sclerosis compared to simple clinical assessment. In 54 patients, conventional and diffusion tensor brain scans and cervical cord T1-weighted scans were acquired at baseline and after 15 months. Clinical evaluation was performed after 5 and 15 years in 49 patients. Lesion load, brain and cord atrophy, mean diffusivity and fractional anisotropy values from the brain normal-appearing white matter and grey matter were obtained. Using linear regression models, we screened the clinical and imaging variables as independent predictors of 15-year disability change (measured on the expanded disability status scale). At 15 years, 90% of the patients had disability progression. Integrating clinical and imaging variables at 15 months predicted disability changes at 15 years better than clinical factors at 5 years (R2 = 61% versus R2 = 57%). The model predicted long-term disability change with a precision within one point in 38 of 49 patients (77.6%). Integration of clinical and imaging measures allows identification of primary progressive multiple sclerosis patients at risk of long-term disease progression 4 years earlier than when using clinical assessment alone.


Based on Level-2 transaction data of individual stocks in Chinese market, the paper constructs measures to directly estimate positive feedback trading intensity and its asymmetry in high-frequency intervals, and then investigates the impact of feedback trading on market quality. Heterogeneous positive feedback traders are found in high-frequency trading intervals of individual stocks, and the buying-winners effect is generally more intensive than selling-losers effect. The asymmetric positive feedback traders contribute to high volatility, high return autocorrelations, high variance ratios and low speed of price discovery. The asymmetry is positively related to aggressive trading orders and hence large price impact, while positive feedback trading reduces both liquidity provision and trading cost. Collectively, the high-frequency asymmetric positive feedback trading leads to an active-trading but less efficient market.


In this study, in order to investigate the power consumption of feed drive system, a mathematical model to predict for the electric power consumption of feed drive systems is proposed by using the single-axis experimental apparatus. This can be driven by either of ball screw or linear motor and it is possible to change the mechanical properties of the machine such as grease viscosity of the table.The power consumption is simulated by proposed simulation method based on the mathematical model of feed drive system and the simulated results are compared with the measured results of the experimental apparatus to confirm the validity of the simulated results.In addition, it is clarified that the energy usages of the feed drive system. The energy losses of the feed drive system are divided into the loss of viscous friction, coulomb's friction, servo amplifier, and motor. These energy losses are calculated by the proposed model. Then, it is investigated that the influence of the velocity and the friction to the power consumption of feed drive system experimentally.As the results, it is confirmed that proposed simulation method can accurately predict the power consumption of the ball-screw feed drive system. It is also clarified that the friction energy loss of ball-screw drive is larger than one of linear motor drive, and the friction characteristics of linear guides influences the power consumption of linear motor drive system.Copyright © 2013 by ASME


Persistent or recurrent aortic dissection after successful surgical treatment of acute type I aortic dissection is well-known complication. Persistence of the false lumen in the arch or descending aorta can result in a fatal complication and has an undesirable impact on long term prognosis. Endovascular stenting has showed promising result for patients with type III aortic dissection. The role of stenting in management of complex persistent aortic dissection is not well established. In the article we reviewed our early result of combine surgical and endovascular treatment of persistent type I aortic dissection. In our series we did not have mortality. Analysis of early and long term postoperative period showed promising result.


Brexit was a project shaped at the fringes of official politics. Unusually, however, it maintained its fringe-like qualities, including its lack of clarity and ambivalence, even as it took center stage in the political affairs of the country for more than three years. In such a transitional period, powerless segments of society, including vulnerable nonwhite communities, face a much larger and more multifaceted crisis than other sectors of the population. The question of border controls and forms of identification for migrants and those of hyphenated nationality is an alarming sign of a homeland turning into a hostile environment. By relying on data gathered in a three-year-long ethnographic study of the Shia Muslim communities in Scotland, I elaborate on how Scottish citizens marked by their religious culture and darker skin are handling the uncertainty created by Brexit.


The chances of winning highly valued Information Technology (IT) service contracts are influenced by various factors. Identifying key factors driving the competition and the early prediction of the outcome (either winning or losing such sales opportunities) can have significant business benefits. Given the complexity of IT services, range of potential attributes, and scarcity of comparable data sets, the straightforward approach of developing predictive analytical models that works well in other industries, such as consumer products, tends to achieve lower accuracy in this context. In this paper, we develop an approach that uses business insights and domain knowledge in the classification of several of the attributes influencing the outcome. We show how using this approach in a naïve Bayes predictive analytics framework can vastly improve the prediction accuracy. Further, we discuss two applications of our model, early prioritization of newly validated sales opportunities and optimization of sales force allocation and planning.


This dissertation examines the emergence of political pluralism in the unlikely case of Kyrgyzstan. The main question is: How can we explain 'pockets of competition in semi-authoritarian states. The literature has focused on identity politics and more specifically on the 'clan politics' hypothesis, which states that competition is organized along the lines of kinship groups ('clans') and that competition is therefore fractionalized, especially in rural areas. Kyrgyzstan is shown to be a critical case for the 'clan politics' literature. The unit of analysis is two-fold: Single-Member Districts (SMD) and individual candidates in parliamentary elections 1995-2005. Evidence is provided through a candidate survey (n=160), expert interviews, and local level statistics. The whole idea that there actually exists such an informal institution as 'clan politics' in Kyrgyzstan is questioned. At least 'clans' do not exist as corporate groups that actual possess agency characteristics. A 'clan' in the Kyrgyz sense of the word, uruu/uruk, is shown to be something that necessarily involves kinship, therefore refuting a widely used metaphorical conceptualization of the phenomenon. The reason for the politization of these genealogical categories in some rural districts can be found in the incentive structure of the electoral system (SMD), the causal story being: contests were localized and no viable national-level parties existed, therefore some political entrepreneurs turned to imagined 'clans' instead to rally support. This created the impression that there were corporate 'clan' groups that coordinated electoral behavior in rural Kyrgyzstan. Competitiveness has been reduced over time, with the 1995 elections being the most fragmented in terms of Effective Number of Candidates. Until the December 2007 PR elections no new party system emerged. In 2005, the elections were especially competitive in the south, where the already mobilized campaigners later formed the backbone of the ensuing 'Tulip revolution' protests. It is shown that the introduction of election mechanisms empowered local elites to challenge the authorities. Campaign experience and financial resources were also important factors in many competitive races.


Recently, satellite sounders have demonstrated the possibility to probe atmospheric ammonia which opens new and unexpected perspectives to monitor that species (Beer et al., 2008; Clarisse et al., 2009; Coheur et al., 2009). We use the 3 years of IASI data to identify a multitude of hotspots, notably over biomass burning regions and agricultural areas and study correlations with agriculture intensity. We analyse NH3 temporal variations of intensive agricultural areas and provide first comparisons with ground based and/or airborne measurements. Satellite remote sensing is essential for monitoring atmospheric composition and changes. It completes ground-based and airborne measurements (which are limited in spatial and temporal coverage) to improve understanding and monitoring of the evolution of our global atmosphere. The Infrared Atmospheric Sounding Interferometer (IASI) is a passive remote-sensing instrument operating in nadir mode that measures infrared radiation emitted by the Earth surface and the atmosphere in the 645-2760 cm-1 spectral range (Clerbaux et al., 2009). The instrument was launched in 2006 on-board the MetOp-A meteorological platform, which circles in a polar sun-synchronous orbit around the Earth and will provide 15 years of global coverage of atmosphere two times per day. From the high-spectral data we can retrieve concentrations of up to 24 species and of aerosols in the atmosphere. Ammonia concentrations are retrieved from calibrated radiance spectra in near-real-time using sophisticated radiative transfer model and inverse method. Only the day-time orbits (with an overpass at 9.30am) are used in this work, as they show better surface sensitivity. Results


The superconducting joint of the NbTi Cable-in -conduit Conductor (CICC) has been developed and tested on the magnet test facility at Institute of Plasma Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences. The CICC is composed of (2NbTi+1Cu)×3×3×(6+1tube) strands each with 0.85 mm in diameter, which has been developed for a central solenoid model coil. The effective length of the joint is about 500 mm. There have been two common fabrication modes, one of them is to integrate the 2 CICC terminals with the copper substrate via lead-soldering, and the other is to mechanically compress the above two parts into an integrated unit. In the current range from 2 kA to 10 kA the joint resistance changes slightly. Up to now, 11 TF magnets, a central solenoid model coil, a central solenoid prototype coil, and a large PF model coil of PF large coil have been completed via the latter joint in the test facility.


Objective: To inform the adaptation of an intervention from a primary healthcare setting to a tertiary setting, the dietary and related self-management challenges and education programme preferences of adults with type 2 diabetes (T2DM) were explored. Setting: A study was undertaken in a tertiary teaching hospital in Gauteng Province, South Africa. Methods: A qualitative approach was employed. Data were collected via focus-group discussions and open-ended self-administered questionnaires from a convenient purposive sample of T2DM patients (n = 28; 40–70 years) and health professionals (n = 10) respectively. Data were analysed using a thematic framework method. Results: Participants revealed diabetes-related knowledge deficits and struggle with adhering to diet, exercise, medication and appointment keeping as problems affecting patients. They also perceived multiple barriers to effective self-management (financial constraints, unsupportive social and physical environments and personal factors). Patients perceived the challenges to greatly impact on their quality of life and consequently the motivation to self-care appropriately. Participants desired an education programme in the form of monthly group meetings with approaches to enhance learning (e.g. use of examples from peers and the provision of education materials). Strategies for motivating and sustaining programme participation (e.g. testimonials from successful participants) were perceived as necessary. Involving family was seen as a key support for positive behaviour change. Conclusion: In adapting the intervention, the participants' preferences for education need to be considered and the unique challenges addressed. In particular, strategies for enhancing the patients' motivation and the self-efficacy to effectively self-manage are essential.


Background and Objectives: A medication administration process was examined within a university affiliated pediatric hospital. Areas for future improvement will be identified in order to enhance medication practices and ensure the safety of patients during a medication administration.
Methods: To evaluate the effectiveness of the medication administration process in regards to patient safety and quality assurance, a direct observation study of inpatient units was conducted. The outcomes of this study address labeling medication, patient identifiers, the Five Rights of medication administration , the use of nursing staff worksheets, double checks , and the presence of distractions and interruptions during the medication administration process.
Results: From the 60 observations, information was collected and then analyzed both quantitatively as well as qualitatively. The numerical outcomes are shown in the following graphs and the data are discussed at length. The data identify areas where improvements can be made to ensure safe medication administration.
Conclusions: This study provides a first step towards making quality changes to ensure the safety of patients during a medication administration. In order to draw more conclusive results, collection of data would need to take place over a prolonged period of time with a sample population proportionate to the institution.


In wireless communications, 3GPP LTE is one of the solutions to meet the greater transmission data rate demand. One issue inherent to this technology is the PAPR (Peak-to-Average Power Ratio) of OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing) modulation. This high PAPR affects of the efficiency of power amplifiers. One approach to mitigate this effect is the Crest Factor Reduction (CFR) technique. In this work we simulate the impact of Hard Limited Clipping Crest Factor Reduction technique on BER (Bit Error Rate) in OFDM based Systems. In general, the results showed CFR has more effect on higher digital modulation schemes, as expected. More importantly, we show the worst-case degradation due to CFR on QPSK, 16QAM, and 64QAM signals in a linear system. For example, hard clipping of 9dB results in a 2dB increase in signal to noise energy at a 1% BER for 64-QAM modulation.


Revision control is a vital component of digital project management and has been widely deployed for text files. Binary files, on the other hand, have received relatively less attention. This can be inconvenient for graphics applications that use a significant amount of binary data, such as images, videos, meshes, and animations. Existing strategies such as storing whole files for individual revisions or simple binary deltas could consume significant storage and obscure vital semantic information. We present a nonlinear revision control system for images, designed with the common digital editing and sketching workflows in mind. We use DAG (directed acyclic graph) as the core structure, with DAG nodes representing editing operations and DAG edges the corresponding spatial, temporal and semantic relationships. We visualize our DAG in RevG (revision graph), which provides not only as a meaningful display of the revision history but also an intuitive interface for common revision control operations such as review, replay, diff, addition, branching, merging, and conflict resolving. Beyond revision control, our system also facilitates artistic creation processes in common image editing and digital painting workflows. We have built a prototype system upon GIMP, an open source image editor, and demonstrate its effectiveness through formative user study and comparisons with alternative revision control systems.


Resistance to proteolytic enzymes and heat is thought to be a prerequisite property of food allergens. Allergens from peanut (Arachis hypogaea) are the most frequent cause of fatal food allergic reactions. The allergenic 2S albumin Ara h 2 and the homologous minor allergen Ara h 6 were studied at the molecular level with regard to allergenic potency of native and protease-treated allergen. A high-resolution solution structure of the protease-resistant core of Ara h 6 was determined by NMR spectroscopy, and homology modelling was applied to generate an Ara h 2 structure. Ara h 2 appeared to be the more potent allergen, even though the two peanut allergens share substantial cross-reactivity. Both allergens contain cores that are highly resistant to proteolytic digestion and to temperatures of up to 100 degrees C. Even though IgE antibody-binding capacity was reduced by protease treatment, the mediator release from a functional equivalent of a mast cell or basophil, the humanized RBL (rat basophilic leukaemia) cell, demonstrated that this reduction in IgE antibody-binding capacity does not necessarily translate into reduced allergenic potency. Native Ara h 2 and Ara h 6 have virtually identical allergenic potency as compared with the allergens that were treated with digestive enzymes. The folds of the allergenic cores are virtually identical with each other and with the fold of the corresponding regions in the undigested proteins. The extreme immunological stability of the core structures of Ara h 2 and Ara h 6 provides an explanation for the persistence of the allergenic potency even after food processing.


OBJECTIVE
To quantify geometric, inertial, and histomorphometric properties at the mid-diaphyseal level of left and right metacarpal bones (MCB) of racing Greyhounds.

SAMPLE POPULATION
MCB from 7 racing Greyhounds euthanatized for reasons unrelated to MCB abnormalities.

PROCEDURES
Mid-diaphyseal transverse sections of left and right MCB were stained with H&E or microradiographed. Images of stained sections were digitized, and cross-sectional area, cortical area, and maximum and minimum area moments of inertia of each bone were determined. Histomorphometric data (osteonal density, osteonal birefringence, and endosteal new lamellar bone thickness) were collected in 4 quadrants (dorsal, palmar, lateral, medial). Values were compared between limbs and among bones and quadrants.

RESULTS
Cross-sectional area, cortical area, and maximum and minimum moments of inertia of left MCB-IV and -V were significantly greater, compared with contralateral bones. Overall osteonal densities in the dorsal quadrants of left MCB were greater, compared with lateral and medial quadrants. Also, percentage of birefringent osteons was significantly greater in the dorsal quadrant of left MCB-III, -IV, and -V, compared with the palmar quadrant. Thickness of new endosteal lamellar bone was not significantly influenced by limb, bone, or quadrant.

CONCLUSIONS AND CLINICAL RELEVANCE
Increased cortical thickness and geometric properties of left MCB-IV and -V of Greyhounds, together with altered turnover and orientation of osteons in the dorsal quadrants of left MCB, are site-specific adaptive responses associated with asymmetric cyclic loading as a result of racing on circular tracks. Site-specific adaptive remodeling may be important in the etiopathogenesis of fatigue fractures in racing Greyhounds.


In Japanese stock markets, there are two kinds of breaks, i.e., nighttime and lunch break, where we have no trading, entailing inevitable increase of variance in estimating daily volatility via naive realized variance (RV). In order to perform a much more stabilized estimation, we are concerned here with a modification of the weighting technique of Hansen and Lunde (2005). As an empirical study, we estimate optimal weights in a certain sense for Japanese stock data listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. We found that, in most stocks appropriate use of the optimally weighted RV can lead to remarkably smaller estimation variance compared with naive RV, hence substantially to more accurate forecasting of daily volatility.


Experiences in real-world pollution markets suggest that firms make persistent errors in forecasting allowance and credit prices that inform their investment decisions. The residual uncertainty characterizing allowance and credit trading means that pollution markets may fail to deliver cost-effective abatement. This contrasts with price-based policies under which firms make investments that equate marginal abatement cost to an emission tax. We incorporate the additional cost of forecast errors under quantity-based programs into a standard Weitzman-style prices versus quantities framework. We distinguish between individual firms' uncertainty over competitors' private information and systemic uncertainty over future cost shocks. We show that a welfare-maximizing regulator would favor price instruments in response to the prospect of firm-specific forecast errors under quantity instruments, ceteris paribus, and the relative benefit of price instruments increases with forecast error variance. We discuss the role of policy design, such as incorporating price collars, in mitigating cost inefficiencies from price forecast errors.


We present a new stochastic theory for delay-Doppler mapping of the ocean surface for bistatic scattering. This stochastic theory should complement nicely the previous theories for the Global Positioning System (GPS) reflected signals from ocean surfaces, especially that of Zavorotny and Voronovich (2000). We quantify the Doppler spread of the reflected signal before interpreting the delay. Our theoretical results compare very well to Doppler spectra computed using data collected during an airborne campaign. The bandwidth of the spectra is linked to the geometry and to the ocean roughness. The bulk of the Doppler spread is caused by the rms slope and not by the surface orbital velocity. Our stochastic theory is generalized to include the delay mapping made possible by the existence of the pseudorandom noise code on the GPS L-band carrier. These results can be seen as a generalization of Woodward's theorem for FM signals to delay-Doppler analysis of more complicated signals. Our formulation is amenable to inversion for the determination of geophysical parameters such as surface wind vector and mean sea level. Another novelty in our approach is the inclusion of the sea state.


This study investigated various life history stages of salmonids within the River Tweed, UK with a focus on migratory movements. The River Tweed is a large upland river situated on the border between Scotland and England and is home to some of the healthiest stocks of Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) and sea trout (Salmo trutta) in the UK. The research undertaken as part of this thesis aims to assess how management can be improved to aid the migration of salmonids moving within freshwater. This is of particular importance due to increased demand for renewable energy including small scale hydropower as well as legislation that demands improved fish passage within rivers such as the Water Framework Directive.
 Sea trout smolts were captured and acoustic tagged to assess the roles that in river obstructions such as weirs play on their migration between years with varying river flow. The two study years varied radically in flow levels due to the incidences of hydrological drought in 2010 significant differences were observed in the degree of delay smolts experienced at weirs as well as differing responses to flow during years.
 Sea trout and salmon were acoustic tagged and tracked during their freshwater spawning migration. The aim of the study was to examine the interspecific differences in spawning migration such as spawning location and movement rate during migration. By looking at migration rate of sea trout and salmon it was observed that both species decreased their migratory rate the further into the river system they moved. It was also observed that sea trout and salmon spawned in different locations, with sea trout using tributaries and salmon using lower stretches of the Tweed.
 The small scale movements of freshwater resident trout was studied. Freshwater resident trout tend to have relatively small home ranges and often hold a territory within their home range. As a result they also tend to rapidly home back to their territory after being displaced from it. As such, the study aimed to assess the degree to which brown trout home after being displaced, particularly whether being offered a choice of empty territories at their site of displacement would affect their homing behaviour. The study found that there was no apparent difference in homing behaviour observed between treatment groups offered empty territories at their site of displacement compared to controls that were displaced into fully populated sites.

Continued research into the behaviour of salmonid species is important due to increasing demand on water resources, future conflict between man and fishes water needs is inevitable.


As part of the National End of Life Strategy recommendations and the Northwest Evaluation of Dying Matters Week 2010, Greater Manchester Cheshire Cancer Network aimed to provide enhanced communication skills training to all staff to achieve the following aims: Engaging both public and professionals in end of life conversations/advance care planning. Forging community alliances around end of life conversations and care. GMCCN and the Conversations for Life programme delivered a nationally endorsed approach to assist staff in overcoming the fear of starting these conversations with patients/clients in order to support patient-centred care. "Local champions' were identified to recruit staff and a series of staff development days were held and evaluated across the region. Multi-service staff attended each session, providing greater awareness of the need and benefits of early conversations, multi-disciplinary team communication and enhanced patient-centred planning. Enhanced staff attitudes and approaches were found to support local strategies around end of life, palliative care and care-pathway interventions in various settings: community, care home, acute trust and those working in long-term conditions. Outcomes and evaluations to date from more than 143 participating staff and commissioners will be shared.


Summary: Entomophthora culicis, a fungus which parasitizes a variety of small adult dipteran insects, is characterized by the production of asexual spores (conidia) which are forcibly discharged. Of the four developmental possibilities available to conidia, only direct vegetative conidial germination leads to successful infection of a potential insect host. Fatty acids were found to exert profound physiological control over conidium development. In combination with chitin or chitosan, oleic acid (C18:1) consistently induced vegetative conidial germination. Palmitoleic acid (C16:1), linoleic acid (C18:2) and linolenic acid (C18:3) were toxic to conidia over a wide range of concentrations. An excess of oleic acid mitigated the toxic effects of linoleic acid. A possible role for lipid hydroperoxides in the mediation of conidial development by fatty acids is discussed.


Two men undergoing chronic hemodialysis sustained unusual fractures during grand mal convulsions. Both patients showed radiologic evidence of renal osteodystrophy. In one, the fractures involved both femoral necks. In the other, a comminuted fracture occurred in the inferior portion of the left scapula.


We propose a neural sequence-to-sequence model for direction following, a task that is essential to realizing effective autonomous agents. Our alignment-based encoder-decoder model with long short-term memory recurrent neural networks (LSTM-RNN) translates natural language instructions to action sequences based upon a representation of the observable world state. We introduce a multi-level aligner that empowers our model to focus on sentence "regions" salient to the current world state by using multiple abstractions of the input sentence. In contrast to existing methods, our model uses no specialized linguistic resources (e.g., parsers) or taskspecific annotations (e.g., seed lexicons). It is therefore generalizable, yet still achieves the best results reported to-date on a benchmark single-sentence dataset and competitive results for the limited-training multi-sentence setting. We analyze our model through a series of ablations that elucidate the contributions of the primary components of our model.


Genetic diversity assessment is the principle component for conservation and characterization of germplasm. Genetic diversity study of Afghan bread wheat genotypes is a first step to identify and to select high performance genotypes and distribute to wheat breeding programs. The main objective of this study is to investigate of genetic diversity in 35 Afghan bread wheat genotypes by using Simple Sequence Repeat (SSR) and Amplified Fragment Length Polymorphism (AFLP) markers. DNA extraction according to Cetyl Trimethyl Ammonium Bromide (CTAB) method was conducted and the total genomic DNA was isolated from each variety. Sixty-four SSR primer markers were used and eighteen EcoRI+(N)/MseI+(N) primer combinations with their primer sequences were used for selective polymerase chain reaction (PCR) amplification. Every SSR and AFLP fragment was scored as present (1) or absent (0) within all genotypes under study. Marker/ Value ratio of pairwise genetic distance between genotypes according to the SSRs data was from 0.508 to 0.691 with an average distance of 0.599. Relatively different grouping pattern in comparison to AFLP data observed through cluster analysis. Both types of molecular markers (AFLP and SSR) used in this research proved to be suitable for investigating genetic diversity in the genotypes of Afghan bread wheat, however, AFLP markers gave better view of genetically relationships among genotypes than the SSR markers. The grouping generated by AFLP data showed a special agreement with the origin regions of genotypes (Ariana-07 and Mazar-99 originating from the north of Afghanistan, Lalmi-03 and Kabul-02. Large number of DNA bands identified with AFLP markers might provide a better estimation of genetic similarity than those of SSR markers.


The South African Higher Education (HE) sector has faced scrutiny in recent years because of its low participation and high attrition rates. In an attempt to address this, institutions have introduced additional programmes such as Extended Curriculum Programmes (ECPs). In this study, we followed an interpretive research paradigm to explore students' experiences and perceptions of the somatology ECP at the Durban University of Technology DUT). Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 15 individual students out of the 69 graduates of the somatology ECP. The participants believe that social integration and reduced academic workload over an extended period contributed to their academic performance. The participants felt that support subjects such as writing skills and computer literacy and the work done by staff and mentors of the ECP facilitated their academic success. The findings from the study suggest that the somatology ECP was successful, too, in the social integration of students while preparing them for success.


A 13-month-old boy admitted with lethargy and hydrocephalus was found to have a right thalamic mass. Ventricular drainage was instituted, and the tumor mass was reduced by partial resection and local irradiation. A ventriculoperitoneal shunt was then placed. However, the tumor recurred 16 months later, with extensive ventricular seeding and peritoneal metastasis through the shunt tube. The child died 22 months after onset. Histological study of surgical specimens of the primary tumor and autopsy specimens of the brain and peritoneal metastatic tumors revealed poorly differentiated, small, round cells with numerous mitotic figures. In addition, autopsy specimens of the brain tumor contained areas of ependymal, oligodendroblastic, and spongioblastic differentiation. On immunohistochemical study, the tumor cells of each specimen were positive for anti-neuron specific enolase and anti-neurofilament antibodies, but negative for anti-glial fibrillary acidic protein antibodies. Electron microscopy revealed some zonulae adherens. These findings strongly suggest that the tumor originated from primitive multipotential cells capable of differentiating into ependymal, glial, and neuronal lines.


The paper aims at defining a methodology to evaluate the lightning performance of a system of overhead distribution lines. As is well known, the evaluation of the lightning performance relies generally on a Monte Carlo approach that generates many different lightning events and calculates the corresponding overvoltages. To perform such calculation, the power system computer aided design (PSCAD) module developed in the companion paper is adopted. However, as any call to PSCAD implies a nonnegligible computational effort, here an efficient approach is presented in order to limit the number of simulations as much as possible. The obtained results are compared with the ones provided by other available techniques both on simple structures in order to highlight the main features of the method and on a typical Italian distribution network segment. The comparative analysis shows good agreement between the methods and the effectiveness of the proposed technique in terms of computational effort reduction.


Upper bounds on the state complexity of minimal trellises for turbo codes are reported. State complexity depends on a permutation of bit positions, and three specific types of bit orders are considered. One is the standard order. The other two are known to result in a very low complexity when the interleaver in the encoder is a block interleaver. This tendency may be explained on the basis of the fact that the upper bounds for these two types of bit orders will be very small when the interleaver is a block type. Two newly defined interleaver parameters are used here to describe the upper bounds.


Dapsone (4,4'-Diaminodiphenylsulphone) is simplest, oldest, cheapest, most active antibacterial agent belongs to sulphone family. It is used to treat various infections such as Hansen?s disease, cutaneous mycetoma, Pnemocystis carinii etc. It is also employed in many immune and hypersensitivity disorders like dermatitis herpetiformis, vasculitis, polyartritis nodosa etc. Dapsone can cause several adverse reactions ranging from simple rashes to multiorgan involvement. Here we are reporting a rare case so called dapsone syndrome or DHS (Dapsone Hypersensitivity Syndrome), which include skin eruption (rash), fever and internal organ involvement like hepatobiliary, pulmonary, hematological and neurological and others. Our patient presented with fever, skin eruption, jaundice, and anaemia which responded to withdrawn of dapsone and intravenous steroids.


In criminal procedure the protection of human rights requires to grant victims a special procedural status, which would enable them to take advantage of active protection of their rightful interests in criminal proceedings. However, when discussing about the improvement of the legal status of the victim the essential question is if we treat the victim as the subject of criminal procedural relations in the same manner. The purpose of the article is to analyse the concept of the victim in Lithuanian and foreign legislation, legal writings and sources of international law. Having analysed the essential factors, the authors have made suggestions regarding the improvement the status of the victim and made the following conclusions: – the concept of the victim, with the exception of Poland, Russia and other post soviet states is not widely known. The laws abroad limit themselves to indicating features of persons who are eligible participants in the criminal proceedings. This way the concept is narrowed and a way too broad at times; – the concept of the victim in criminal procedure is more a theoretical dispute linked to the usage of different terminology. First, the object under discussion is still the same, second the biggest importance is attached to formalities of recognizing the personas a victim. Therefore the concept of the victim, or the term "victim" is used in a different sense in other legal fields and legislation. – the concept of the victim has not been co-ordinated in Lithuanian legal acts and is not elaborated, therefore we propose defining the victim in the following way: victim shall be a natural or legal person about which sufficient data is available to confirm that as a result of criminal activities he has suffered physical or moral damages, as well as a result of preparation or attempt to commit a crime or there has been a great probability that the damage will occur. In the event of death of the victim, next of the kin or other statutory representatives shall be recognized victims; – the person shall be recognized a victim by writing down the protocol of rights and duties of the victim in criminal proceedings as soon as the information about the damages sustained is available for the pre-trial investigation institutions or prosecutors office or the mentioned circumstances are established by an officer of pre-trial investigation institutions or prosecutor himself. The copy of the protocol shall be given to the victim; – in the event the grounds for being recognised a victim disappear, a motivated decision on that must be made and the relevant person must be informed.


This paper is developed to examine the significance of Six Sigma Methodology towards the improvement of the Malaysian Hotel Industry. It was known that there are many strategies that had been developed over the years to improve service quality and delivery in the Hospitality and Tourism Industry. The industry by norm is known to use service deliverer; therefore, seeking the best method to increase employee job performance is seen to be vital. From the review of the literature it was found that they are several hospitality and tourism organizations used Six Sigma to enhance their service delivery efficiency. Six Sigma, 6σ symbolizes a specific number, which is 3.4 defects per million opportunities (DPMO), where opportunity is understood as any possible source of error in product, process, or service. There are three principles that build Six Sigma approach and they are: a) teamwork, b) statistical control process (SPC) and c) shared vision. Nonetheless, this paper will focus on a single constituent of Six Sigma that is 'Shared Vision'.


Depletion of glutathione in Chinese hamster ovary cells in vitro by diethyl maleate resulted in enhancement of the effect of x-rays on cell survival under hypoxic conditions but not under oxygenated conditions. Hypoxic EMT6 tumor cells were similarly sensitized in vivo. The action of diethyl maleate is synergistic with the effect of the electron-affinic radiosensitizer misonidazole, suggesting that the effectiveness of misonidazole in cancer radiotherapy may be improved by combining it with drugs that deplete intracellular glutathione.


The background to the present study is supplied by two studies of a large Swedish public organisation. A strong hierarchy, which maintains a traditional view of functional departments as being the owners of IT products, creates stovepipes and silos, not only within the systems but also within the organisation. This tends to obstruct crossfunctional projects and the ability to ascertain general needs and requirements. The present study considers the integration of business and IT processes, focusing on the development process and the purchaser-contractor relations. The purpose is to find success factors, good examples and areas of improvement from private companies relating to the problems from the studied public organisation. Sixteen interviews with five Swedish banks and one insurance company appeared to suggest that the problems highlighted in previous studies, e.g. stovepipe systems and departments, were not recognised as significant problems within any of the interviewed organisations. In general, the development processes were considered well-oiled with little friction between departments, system owners, purchasers and contractors. In almost all interviews, it was considered that the integration of customer, information and IT was more cohesive than previously. The findings from the interviews have been categorised into nine factors or areas. Three general business environment factors – the history of organisational change and mergers, the overall economic situation and the strong customer focus – seem to have broken the functional mind-sets and sharpened and focused the organisations into a collaborative culture. Furthermore, a great deal of hard work appears to have been centered upon three factors relating to processes and the management of projects: the development processes are generally very well defined and well known internally, projects are smaller with modules and releases, and there is an open discussion about stovepiped departments and general requirements. Lastly, there are three areas of improvement: The role and competencies of the purchaser, the infrastructure and the need for an enterprise architecture, and the document interface including the use of RUP and UML.


Aedes aegypti, the dengue vector, is a menace continuing since 1780; it is due to development of resistant to synthetic insecticides and Staphylococcus aureus, the common microbial pathogen agent of food poisoning, skin infections and respiratory infections have developed multidrug resistant, which forced us to focus on novel agent for which the dengue vector and bacterial pathogen have not practiced to develop resistant and which cannot detoxify it using its usual enzyme activity as it did earlier. Silver nanoparticles a challenging insecticidal agents for the toxic degrading enzymes of both the insect and microbe was the target of our present study to excavate the potential in killing immature of dengue vector and bacterial pathogen. Green protocolled nanoparticles were successfully synthesized using leaf extract of Nilgirianthus ciliatus which act as reducing as well as capping agents. The UVvis spectra observed at 441nm confirmed the presence of silver nanoparticles. XRD and FT-IR confirmed the crystalline nature and organic capping around the silver nanoparticles respectively. SEM and DLS showed the average size at 117 nm and the particle dispersion was at -17.2mV zeta potential.


This letter reformulates the recently proposed qualitative imaging technique, which is the near-field orthogonality sampling method (NOSM), for 2-D cross-borehole ground penetrating radar (GPR) applications. The NOSM employs the reduced scattered electric field as its indicator function. To derive a relationship between the scattered electric field and the indicator, an integral equation is defined, linking these two quantities to each other. The introduced integral equation is solved analytically for full aperture case. Furthermore, it is shown that the derived integral operator can work for limited aperture scenario. Thus, the NOSM can approximate positions of the targets even with a single-view–multistatic imaging configuration. Feasibility of the proposed method is tested with a specific cross-borehole GPR application, which is the oil shale survey in a limestone. Obtained results show that the proposed technique can distinguish multiple targets with a few numbers of measurements.


Abstract A computable general equilibrium model linked to a microsimulation model is applied to assess the potential short‐term effects on the South African economy of the ongoing COVID‐19 pandemic. With a particular focus on distributional outcomes, two simulations are run, a mild and a severe scenario. The findings show significant evidence of decline in economic growth and employment, with the decline harsher for the severe scenario. The microeconomic results show that the pandemic moves the income distribution curve such that more households fall under the poverty line while at the same time, inequality declines. The latter result is driven by the disproportionate decline in incomes of richer households while the poorest of the poor are cushioned by government social grants that are kept intact during the pandemic. The COVID‐19 pandemic is still unfolding and its economic modelling as well as the data used to operationalise the model will need to be updated and improved upon as more information about the disease and the economy becomes available.


Well casing damage is a commonly existing problem in oilfield exploitation in the world. Daqing oilfield is a multiple-zone, heterogeneity sandstone oilfield, where the major influence factors which lead to casing damage are geologic factor, engineering factor, high pressure water injection and chemical factors. Among them, the high pressure water injection is the most important one. Water injection exploitation in Daqing oilfield showed that casing-damage increased with the increasing water injection pressure. However, the mechanism is not totally understood and the control method is not well developed yet. In the present work, the mechanism analysis of casing damage induced by high pressure water injection in Daqing oilfield is proposed. It is found that after high pressure water injection, the sandstone layer will expand and result in the vertical elongation of the casing. The additive tensile stress of the casing induced by vertical strains will cause casing-damage. Besides, the horizontal deformation of clay-stone increases with increasing water content of the formation layers and soaking time. The cohesion of clay-stone and inner friction angle decreased with increasing water quantity. In that case, some high obliquity formation layers which may induce high hypsography pressure difference will cause localized slip along weak formation layer interface in the area of waterishlogged clay-stone. Casing damage and well failure caused by the relative movement of the formation layer interface may therefore occur. The micro-fracture of formation induced by high pressure water injection also educed formation rupture and casing damage.


Invasive macrophytes threaten freshwater ecosystem biodiversity. We analyzed the impact of the invasive white ginger lily ( Hedychium coronarium Konig J, 1783.– Zingiberaceae) on aquatic insect assemblages living in the littoral zone of a tropical reservoir. We took aquatic insect samples in the littoral zone on four main vegetal profile banks: white ginger monotypic bank, forest partially invaded, native macrophyte monotypic bank and riparian forest. At each vegetal bank, we measured abiotic variables such as dissolved oxygen, pH, water temperature and depth. We analyzed the aquatic insects through abundance, richness and Simpson diversity.  We used the non-Metric Multidimensional Scaling (nMDS) analysis to analyze the spatial distribution of each assemblage, and Analysis of similarities (ANOSIM) to verify differences amongst dissimilarity distances.  Additionally, we analyzed the main taxa associated with invasive macrophytes through indicator species analyses using IndVal index. We observed that the invasive macrophyte banks presented higher abundance of associated specimens, as well as lower dissimilarity of aquatic insect assemblages. Additionally, invasive macrophytes shifted the water pH and littoral depth of reservoir banks. The IndVal index indicated eight aquatic insects as indicator species. Labrundinia unicolor Silva, 2013 , Ablabesmyia depaulai Neubern, 2013 and Diastatops Rambur, 1842 were indicator species on banks. We concluded that invasion of white ginger lily caused loss of shallow littoral habitat and altered the pH of the surrounding water probably by high decomposition rate and high production of plant biomass. We suggest the use of species of aquatic insects as indicator species to monitor white ginger lily impact in freshwater systems.


Objective: In order to maintain its market share in current competitive scenario, every design organization must enhance its creativity skills, the basis to innovate and develop adequate solutions to changing costumers' needs. A great expertise is required to reach such creativity level, a skill currently dependent on human capability. As such knowledge is subjected to availability, the development of a computational system with the capacity of selecting appropriately creativity techniques becomes relevant, emulating decision-making ability. This work aims to elucidate implemented metrics on a knowledge-based system (KBS) for asserting creativity techniques, serving as a comparison filter between typical design team's needs and the available techniques. Design/Methodology/Approach: Creativity tools are powerful allies in building alternative mind pathways, through which a team may develop better and more suitable ideas. Each tool has appropriate use situations, covering several aspects of the design process, organization and team profile. To assert appropriately creativity techniques, the KBS requires a logic connection between factors that lead to the choice and the actual tool selection, i.e. the system output results. Such chaining was structured in a double inference process using categorization, which describes the entry scenario in terms of five categories and matches the identified values of each category with available creativity techniques. Results: The developed prototype is able to select adequate creativity techniques in design. The five categories aid in filtering techniques according to the design situation, reducing the selection spectrum and supporting the appropriate choice of tools. In its current version, the prototype selects among 24 creativity support techniques in a combination of more than 500 design scenarios. The outputs include explanations on the used inference process, learnings on how to use each tool, overall information and examples.


Intraand interparticle structural effects were studied in polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA) latex dispersions in a nonpolar solvent with the technique of light scattering. The required transparency of the dispersions was attained by a close matching of the refractive index of PMMA and solvent, for which benzene was chosen. Two latices were studied with divinylbenzene (DVB) and ethylene glycol dimethacrylate (EGDM) as crosslinking agents. The latex particles were characterized by electron microscopy in the dry state and by viscosity, sedimentation, light scattering, and laser light scattering spectroscopy in dilute solutions. The molar mass of the particles is in the range of 5 × 109 g mole-L In benzene they are swollen and a hydrodynamic radius in the range of 200 nm was measured. The light scattering intensity and its angular variation were found to be strongly temperature dependent, This could be explained by the difference in temperature coefficients of the refractive indexes of PMMA and benzene which is sufficient to change their matching appreciably. For the latex containing DVB this phenomenon could be used to characterize the spatial distribution of the DVB inside the particle. At higher concentrations (20-80 g dm 3) light scattering as a function of scattering angle shows the emergence of a diffuse diffraction peak which points to interparticle structural effects. In one case the radial distribution function of particle centers was determined by a Fourier transformation of the structure factor and is discussed in terms of some theories of atomic liquids. The position of the diffraction peaks as a function of concentration is also discussed in terms of an "expanded-latt ice" structure, Results suggested that some structure persisted down to concentrations of 2% (w/v) of latex. However, the calculated mean interpa~icle distances seem much too large to be explained on a basis of interpenetration of peripheral chains of the particles. Attempts were made to interpret the long range interaction by electrostatic repulsions. However, measurements of the electric conductivity of the dispersions do not corroborate this view. Similar structural effects showed up with laser light scattering spectroscopy, where it was found that the diffusion coefficient depended on the scattering angle. On prolonged standing some of the systems showed sharp, bright diffraction peaks in visible light due to the formation of "supramolecular crystals" as reported earlier in the literature.


Abstract Despite the growing potential for multiplexity in our complex social world, social network methodology often does not adequately capture this phenomenon. Most commonly in research on egocentric social networks, when respondent designate a tie as both family member and friend, the tendency is to default to "family" prior to aggregation for analysis, potentially ignoring important and meaningful variation. As a result, relatively little is known about multiplexity in personal social networks, and particularly about individuals who are simultaneously kin and friends. To address this gap, we assess the rate of occurrence of kinship/friendship multiplexity, and examine characteristics of alters nominated as friends and kin in comparison to those with unidimensional functionality. We find that this kind of multiplexity is fairly common–comprising about one-fifth of kinship ties and one-fourth of friendship ties. Moreover, cross–listed alters are significantly different from those characterized in one function, serving in greater capacity in terms of provision of support, frequency of contact, closeness, and as resources for discussion of important matters. Our findings underscore the critical need to appropriately classify multiplex kinship/friendship ties to avoid making incorrect inferences about support processes and their effects on outcomes across different relationship types.